December 2008 Archives

On Monday, the Vatican formally endorsed an iPhone application that allows users to load the Breviary prayer book, prayers for saying a Catholic Mass, and other prayers.

The application for iPhone, called iBreviary, was created by Rev. Paolo Padrini and Web designer Dimitri Giani. It's available for purchase in Europe, and in the U.S. Languages included in the U.S. version are Italian and English.

The Catholic Church is "learning to use the new technologies primarily as a tool or as a mean of evangelizing, as a way of being able to share its own message with the world," Monsignor Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications, told the Associated Press.

HP has launched an application that allows iPhone users to print their photos and pictures wirelessly.

iPrint Photo is available to download as an application through Apple's App Store and lets users print a photo simply by touching it on their screen. Once the image is pressed an instruction to print is sent over wireless to an inkjet printer.

"Wireless printing is a fun extension of the iPhone/iPod touch's easy photo capture and viewing experience," said HP "Images stored on your iPhone or iPod touch can print on most HP networked inkjet printers connected to a local Wi-Fi network. Pictures will print out at a standard photo size."

Furthering its attempt to appear on every gaming platform in existence, Puzzle Quest is now available for purchase by iPhone and iPod touch users.

Though the basic, wildly addictive gameplay mechanisms remain intact for the downloadable title, developer Transgaming has split the game into a trilogy, presumably for easier acquisition by those prospective gamers who might have data transfer limits in place.

The initial release, Puzzle Quest: Chapter 1 - Battle of Gruulkar, is available now from the App Store for $10. The two remaining segments of the game are scheduled for release soon, and will allow players to carry over their vital statistics from one segment to the next.

Leaving your iPod sitting there on the dashboard while you are out shopping is definitely a target for thieves - so keeping it safely hidden from view by inserting it into the stomach of the Fusion Electronics CA-IP500 music player is an appealing prospect.

The deep unit swallows an entire iPod, just like an old cassette-based car player, leaving it hidden from the view of opportunist thieves.

The CA-IP1500, Fusion claims, is the first iPod dock that works inside a car’s head unit, and that lets you control the iPod by using the knobs and dials on the front.

There are many gadgets to help drivers stay on the right side of the law and the iBreath is the latest for the iPhone and iPod.

The iBreath is an alcohol breath test that attaches to your iPod. Hollywood A-listers have been among the first to purchase the new gadget, and not only is this gizmo a breathalyzer but it also features as an iPod and iPhone FM transmitter.

The device includes a flip down mouth piece that users can blow in to receive a digital reading of the amount of alcohol detected in their breath. The iBreath when available will cost around £55.

Christmas shoppers have snapped up record numbers of iPods – making it the biggest seller of the season.

The gadget has outstripped rival products in the battle for the must-have festive gift. Google said the iPod touch was their most searched-for product after Nintendo's Wii games console and Wii Fit.

And Amazon's electronics bestseller list has six iPods in its top 20, including all three versions of the touch. The iPod typically accounts for up to half of Apple's sales in the last few months of the year. The most popular is the lowest-priced 8Gb version, which retails for around £165.

Touch, shuffle, and tap are terms commonly associated with the iPod. The audio manufacturer Alesis is hoping to add another: record.

The company has introduced the ProTrack, which it bills as the world's first professional hand-held digital stereo recorder for iPod. The ProTrack lets users record live audio on their iPod (Classic or 5th Generation) or iPod Nano (2nd or 3rd Generation) via an integrated recorder with two microphones.

Other features include a universal dock and LED signal indicators. Four AAA batteries provide up to five hours of recording time. The ProTrack's tripod mount can help enhance recording quality. The ProTrack will cost about £135.

Apple announced today that it has introduced a new range of iPods this festive season. The new range varies from 1GB iPod shuffle to a 32 GB iPod touch, said a press release.

iPod Nano, which is now available in eight colours, also sports a curved aluminium enclosure. The 120 GB iPod Classic, with up to 36 hours of audio playback time and a 2.5-inch colour display, now has 50 more capacity, the release added.

Apple has also introduced a RED special edition of iPod Nano and iPod shuffle. Apple said this has been introduced for a cause, as a portion of the purchase goes to AIDS Fund in Africa.

Studio Radiolaris, a newly founded games studio with an emphasis on music, has released Radio Flare, a musical shooter game for iPhone and iPod touch. In Radio Flare users fly a space ship equipped with a sonification beam that desynchronizes space debris, as well as an entire alien invasion force.

Propelled by radio flares, your ship speeds pulsing through deep space, taking you on a journey into sound. The game features an interactive electronica track from Berlin based electronic musician DJ Glow of Trust Records.

In Radio Flare you steer your ship with one finger while targeting enemies with another. Enemies that have been hit are desynchronized in time to the beat and blast out radio flares. Collect radio flares to advance to the next stage and intensify the soundtrack. Radio Flare, a musical shooter game for iPhone and iPod touch, will cost around £2.99.

A teenager listened to music from his iPod while having a brain tumour removed in a six-hour operation.

He explained: "Gavin's tumour was in a very difficult place and we had to ensure we didn't damage important parts of his brain. One step too far when removing it - even just a few millimetres - could have paralysed him."

He said: "We needed to make sure that we were not in the wrong place or he was in pain, so we kept him awake. He was given an anaesthetic that numbs the pain and makes you drowsy but able to communicate. "The music from the iPod kept him alert but also made him relax and gave him something else to think about." He told The Sun: "This approach to the operation has paid off and Gavin is now up on his feet and doing amazingly well."

Market tracker Dow Jones has launched Dow Jones: Sales Triggers, a new iPhone app that provides alerts on business-related news. The app uses predefined news categories for its triggers; alerts can be raised, for instance, by management changes, such as a CEO, CFO or other major player leaving or joining a company. Mergers, acquisitions and new investments can also be triggers.

The iPhone app additionally provides access to reference information, such as company backgrounds, and executive lists with contact info. Companies can be searched by name or ticker symbol, yielding data such as phone numbers, addresses, URLs, yearly revenue and the number of workers. Background on executives provides past affiliations and positions.



The Dow Jones: Sales Triggers app is now available on the iTunes App Store, free of charge. It works with the iPhone and iPod touch.

Namco has debuted I Love Katamari, an action game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Players must replace stars that have been accidentally knocked out of the sky by the King of All Cosmos; equipped with a katamari ball, users tilt their handheld to roll up various objects and increase the size of the ball, which in turn allows for larger items to be added. The game features several different modes, including story, time attack, exact-size challenge and external modes, the last of which lets players roll at their own pace without time or size limits.

At the start of the game, the position of an iPhone or iPod is used to calibrate the accelerometer for the katamari's movement. Due to its importance, the setting can be re-calibrated at any time by touching the katamari.

Buyers of the Taiwanese iPhone will find it unlocked, reports say. Although the phone's official carrier in the country -- Chunghwa Telecom -- has in the past insisted that the phone would only work on its network, in practice, the new iPhone will accept SIM cards from other carriers' networks without any hardware or software hacks. The only tradeoff, users say, is that Chunghwa's Hami services become inaccessible.

While unlocking cellphones is a common practice in Asia, Apple has traditionally fought any attempt to sell an open iPhone, preferring to collect royalties and subsidies from one or more carrier partners. This could in theory make the Taiwanese iPhone a popular gray-market exportB.



The Taiwanese market is however said to be sharply discounting Apple's iPod shuffle in recent days, pricing a barebones 1GB model over 47 percent lower than the player's normal cost in the country.

Copy and paste will finally arrive for the iPhone Friday, at least in a limited form of copy and paste between Safari and Mail, reports say. Pastebud is a new web-based service which uses a bookmarking system to replicate copy and paste on the iPhone, detouring the App Store by not installing anything.

Two Safari bookmarks serve as copy and paste modules, allowing for selection of text and pasting into Mail or another webpage.

Though the service is limited to Mail and Safari, it should be useful for clipping web text and e-mailing it to friends or co-workers. There is no word yet whether this service for the iPhone will carry a cost.

It's a stretch to suggest that Barack Obama's iPhone application was a major factor in getting him elected, even with half a million downloads. The Obama '08 app organized iPhone contacts by the battleground states in which they lived so backers could target calls. Supporters also could find local offices and events.

But Tim Westergren, founder of the Pandora Internet radio service, doesn't question the impact of the iTunes App Store. With 15,000 new downloads a day, Pandora is the top free downloaded iPhone program at Apple's online store.

"It's hard to overstate how important the iPhone has been," Westergren said in an e-mail. "(We) nearly doubled our growth rate and, perhaps more important, changed the discussion around Internet radio. People are realizing it could really replace broadcast radio, in the car, home audio, on the go."

Westergren said users are listening an astounding 90 minutes a day, on average. The overall growth of the iTunes App Store has been phenomenal. More than 10,000 apps are available for the iPhone or the iPod Touch, up from about 800 when Apple opened its virtual doors in July. People have downloaded more than 300 million programs, from games to business.

Google has announced a new distribution channel for its ubiquitous AdWords contextual advertising platform - your iPhone. According to the Official Google Mobile Blog, ''the Google mobile ads team is announcing a new campaign-level option that allows those of you who are AdWords advertisers to show your desktop text and image ads on the iPhone, the T-Mobile G1, and other mobile devices with full (HTML) Internet browsers.''

While there have been ad slots available previously on mobile devices through AdWords, the links needed to land on a mobile device formatted landing page in order to comply with the various phone browsers formats. The new ad option permits a standard AdWords text ad to land on a 'traditional' html landing page - as the ads will be targeted only at mobile users who can easily view html pages via their phone's browser (like the iPhone).

So what how does the new AdWords option work? The hosting experts at 34sp.com were generous enough to assist in research related to the new ad option and share their knowledge here. To view the new mobile ad option one navigates in their AdWords account to a specific online campaign. Once inside an active campaign, at the top of the page under the name of the campaign is a line entitled, 'Edit Campaign Settings'. Once in the 'Edit Campaign Settings' menu, one navigates to the third grey bar down entitled, 'Networks and bidding'. An option under this grey bar is: 'Device Platform'. This area has a check box next to a setting which reads, "Phones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers". This is the check box to turn this feature 'on' (checked) or 'off' (unchecked).

Reprints of Star Trek comics are now available on iTunes for reading on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Comics publisher and Trek licensee IDW started a regular publishing cycle on Apple's download service with "Star Trek Archives: The Best of Peter David No. 1" -- a DC Comics reprint. The entire comic costs 99 cents through iTunes -- with more issues to follow.

The bigger story here is how the iPhone/iPod Touch is becoming the preferred method of electronic distribution for comics. A quick tour of the iTunes store reveals several online comics, including a sequel to Clash of the Titans. Most of these efforts give you the first taste for free before charging the download fee for follow-up issues.

Truphone, the UK-based company, has created a new freeware application for the iPod Touch which uses the media player's built in Wi-Fi to allow owners to make phone calls via voice over internet protocol (VoIP) systems such as Skype and MSN. Currently only calls to other iPod or iPhone can be made using the application - but developers say calls to landlines will be in place in the near future.

The new technology could revolutionise mobile phone communication as the company promises "there is no monthly line rental, no subscription or other hidden charges". The application will be free to download from the Apple applications store. To get up and running you will need a microphone adaptor, which will be available to buy "soon", according to Truphone.

Geraldine Wilson, Truphone's CEO, said: "There are a slew of new features we're rolling out for the iPod Touch that will let users call landlines, Skype users or send instant messages. We're talking weeks, not months, before these go live. We've decided to focus on devices that are wi-fi enabled and have an applications store. For the consumer, there has to be an easy way of downloading an application. Our focus on the consumer side - at least in the short term - is finding devices that fit that category," she added.

Weezer have recorded six Christmas songs especially for an iPhone game, set to go on sale in the coming days.

‘Christmas With Weezer’ is built on ‘Tap Tap Revenge’, the game for iPhone and iPod Touch, in which users tap and shake their devices to the tunes of the music.

The band recorded six Christmas songs exclusively for the game, ‘We Wish You A Merry Christmas’, ‘Silent Night’, ‘O Holy Night’, ‘First Noel’, ‘Hark The Herald Angels Sing’ and ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’, along with two bonus tracks. The six Christmas cover tracks were recorded exclusively for the game, and are not available anywhere else.

Pangea Software, the developer of the award winning puzzle game Enigmo and popular racing title Cro-Mag Rally, announced today that Antimatter, a unique physics based arcade-style game, is now available for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.

"Antimatter is the first game Pangea designed from the ground up for the iPhone operating system," stated Brian Greenstone, president of Pangea Software. "It's a physics based arcade game that will really appeal to anyone who liked Enigmo. The Antimatter graphics are stunning, the audio is incredible and the gameplay is extremely addictive!"

The iPod Touch is set to become standard equipment for Ohio State University med students.

They’ll use the devices to view videos of medical treatments and review images of the human body and organs. Students with the handheld gadgets also will be able to show patients photographs to help identify medications they’re already taking before any new drugs are given.

The university says within two years every Ohio State medical student will be issued an iPod Touch loaded with special medical software.