The unofficial iPhone development community has contributed numerous applications which serve to make your life easier and/or make you more productive. While the subject of this HOWTO, vWallpaper, does neither, what it does do is offer up some eye candy to wow your friends and neighbors with.
vWallpaper allows you to replace your boring old static wallpaper with video wallpaper. That's right, wallpaper that moves. The good news is, if
Earlier today, iPhoneFAQ reported on the delayed release of the highly anticipated iPhone tool named "Pwnage", which was supposedly poised to bring about a new era in iPhone hacking/jailbreaking/whathaveyou tools. However, according to a recent press release published on the iPhone DevTeam's website, not only will Pwnage not be released, but the iPhone DevTeam has ceased all activity in the iPhone development community -- both a result of a buyout offer from an unnamed source.
Unlike other jailbreak solutions, which require users to restore and re-jailbreak and/or unlock their iPhones with each subsequent iPhone firmware release, Pwnage was touted to allow an individual to modify their iPhone only once with Pwnage, then subsequently perform normal iTunes updates while keeping the iPhone in a jailbroken/open state. As mentioned above, the release of Pwnage was expected over the weekend, but failed to come. The iPhone DevTeam updated their website on March 30th indicating tha the release of Pwnage would be delayed, but would be coming "sometime this week".
As it turns out, Pwnage will not be released. Earlier today, the iPhone DevTeam updated their website with a press release which indicates that the team will no
The highly anticipated iPhone hacking/unlocking/jailbreaking/and more tool, Pwnage, scheduled for release yesterday by the iPhone Dev Team, has been delayed. According to the Dev Team, the release has been delayed in order to clarify potential legal issues with the release.
As developers and other interested parties sift through the iPhone SDK, many new details are emerging. While most of these are positive, more recently some troublesome details have come to light. Several iPhoneFAQ readers have written in informing us of some strange limitations Apple is evidently placing on applications developed via the newly released SDK.
These limitations may place significant limitations on the types of software that can be developed for the iPhone using the SDK. These limitations include,
Bay Partners turned many a head in the financial and software development worlds when it drummed up $10 million dollars last year to fund application development for Facebook. On Friday, San Francisco venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers trumped that offer ten times over, by establishing a $100 million dollar fund to back software development for the Apple iPhone.
Without question, we weren't the only ones wondering whether the demontration of EA's highly anticipated game Spore running on an Apple iPhone at today's iPhone Software Roadmap event was an indication of an eventual release of an iPhone version of spore - or just a whipped up demo version to produce a "wow" factor at today's event. As it turns out, EA has confirmed that they will indeed be releasing a version of the game for the iPhone.
EA is one of the largest game developers for Apple's iPod. According to statements released after today's Apple event by EA, they have been actively using the iPhone SDK to develop versions of not only Spore, but other popular
A new, potentially terribly useful, third party application for the iPhone was recently released by a Carnegie Mellon University student named Jahanzab Sherwani. This new application, called 'Touchpad for iPhone', allows you to use your iPhone as a wireless touchpad to control your PC mouse. The application is based heavily on VNsea (a graphical VNC client for both the iPhone and the iPod touch) and requires that you have a VNC server installed on the PC you wish to control.
At first, this might seem like a useless parlor trick, but a quick bit of thinking (or reading of Sherwani's suggested uses) quickly reveals a potential for a serious level of utility from Touchpad. Basically, Touchpad allows you full mouse based control over your PC via your iPhone. As Sherwani points out, this means that Touchpad for iPhone can be used to wirelessly perform tasks on your PC such as
There's been a lot of talk recently about how this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) yielded little to be excited about. For the most part, the iPhone field at CES didn't effort to depart from this norm. However, there were a couple iPhone related tidbits worth talking about. One of which was Delphi's experimental iPhone software which allowed an iPhone to control a car. And yes, that's not a typo, it's not the car controlling the iPhone - the iPhone is controlling the car.
The software communicates with the car via Bluetooth and can be used, impressively, from up to a mile away. Though purely a proof-of-concept at this stage, the software already offers an exciting feature set.
Through the software, the iPhone can handle diagnostic checks such as tire pressure and fluid checks such as gas
Polar Bear Farm Software has recently released a somewhat groundbreaking piece of third-party software for the Apple iPhone called PBF ShowTime. ShowTime's claim to fame is that it brings video capture/recording to the iPhone - a feature not natively found on the iPhone (at least not as of firmware 1.1.2). Though other experimental applications that record video on the iPhone have been released, none have been as well-formed or fully featured as ShowTime.
That's not to say that ShowTime doesn't have it's issues. It certainly does. First, a look at what ShowTime can do:
Though seemingly simple, that's nothing to squawk at. This simple feature list is, as mentioned, more than we've seen from other attempts. Take a look at the following video to see ShowTime in action
Newly available via Installer/AppTapp is iSMS, a native text messaging client replacement for the iPhone. iSMS - also called weiSMS, is partially based on WeSMS, a Chinese SMS application, and provides a list of features/enhancemens not found in the standard iPhone SMS application. These lacking features have been high on iPhone owners' lists of gripes with the iPhone.
Though very much a beta, officially only a "preview release", iSMS provides many functions not available when sending text messages on the iPhone through the included interface. The two most prominent of these added features are the ability to send a text message to multiple recipients (or bulk SMS) and the ability to forward received text messages.
The list of major SMS features not normally available on the iPhone which iSMS adds includes the following:
