iPhone Apps

The east coast of the US is about to get clobbered by hurricane Sandy. For those iPhone owners who still have power, several apps can track the action and help you prepare to keep your family safe. In fact, these iOS applications can help during any emergency, natural disaster or dangerous weather event.

From locating shelters to learning first aid, most of the apps are free. Several have configurable alerts that will keep you informed without even having to open the app. Here's a list of the top 5 iPhone apps for storms and hurricanes. Keep that iOS device battery charged in case the power goes out!

Customers who are familiar with the shopping frenzy that often surrounds highly anticipated new products, such as electronics, video games and toys, now have a valuable new tool to aid in their search for these hard to find items.

Online media and publishing firm Cignal Media LLC announced today the launch of whohas.it, a new online service that allows users to monitor and locate hard to find, out of stock or pre-release products. When paired with the whohas.it app, now available for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, hopeful shoppers can receive realtime notifications when the product they are searching for arrives in stock or becomes available for pre-ordering.

Lonely Planet Travel Guides are no strangers to the iOS App Store. Now travelers have even more options, with the launch of six country guides to complement the already-popular city guides. Visitors to Australia, Italy, France, Spain, Costa Rica and Ireland can now grab a comprehensive guide for $9.99.

If you're already carrying an iPhone or iPod touch, this option makes it unnecessary to carry guide books and adds features that take advantage of your smartphone. GPS tracking linked with offline maps are provided for the entire country right down to individual neighborhoods.

Now you can warp back to 1998 and take 1-bit photos on your iPhone, much like the Game Boy Camera of yesteryear. The images are saved directly to your camera roll in stunning 320 x 480 resolution black and white. Officially, that's more than 150 kilopixels, or by a more familiar measure 0.15 megapixels.

To get the image just right, there are high and low contrast modes and two dithering options. When it comes to dithering, you can choose Atkinson (used on the original Mac in 1984) and Bayer (Nintendo Game Boy) for two distinctly unique styles. The flash or front facing camera can be used for those with newer iPhones.

You might think that wiping your lost or stolen iOS device would prevent another party from receiving messages via iMessage on the wiped device. As it turns out, Apple will be doing some work to issue a security update in future iterations of iMessage.

Users have discovered through an unpleasant trial and error process that the only way to stop text messages coming in via the iMessage service is to change your Apple ID. Wiping the lost iPhone and deactivating the phone number does nothing to stop a thief from receiving and reading your iMessages. These texts will be delivered to your old iPhone as well as the new one you just purchased to replace the lost device.