The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

For some, the recently released iTennis game in the iTunes App Store looked extremely familiar -- that's because it was a rather blatant ripoff of code provided by the iCodeBlog, a site known for its free iPhone coding tutorials. The original tutorial, written by Brandon Trebitowski, was apparently compiled and submitted by Peter Sheen of BlaBlaIncTech and placed on sale for $.99USD on iTunes in late May.

Trebitowski revealed the theft through iCodeBlog yesterday, and Jonathan Siegel got in touch with us regarding the situation. As response has gotten out through iCodeBlog, there has been a backlash through both BlaBlaIncTech's site and the App Store. As a result, around 4:45 Pacific Time, the game was pulled from iTunes.

In an attempt to contact someone from BlaBlaIncTech, I headed over to the site to find no contact information except for a support chat that was spammed with nearly 15,000 comments regarding the theft. While I was writing up this post, BlaBlaIncTech removed the link to its guestbook from the front page of the site. Ten minutes later, the game was gone from the App Store. Ten minutes after that, all mention of iTennis was gone from BlaBlaIncTech's site.

Wi-Fi connectivity problems are not limited to the iPhone 3GS, not by a long shot. The iPhone 3G is widely reported to have connectivity problems that, according to the large number of people discussing it on the Apple Support Discussions, dwarf the reports regarding the 3GS.

In over fourteen Apple Discussion threads, over six hundred messages have been posted with the first one being written on June 17th, shortly after the release of iPhone 3.0 software. These threads have been read by thousands of users. Unfortunately, to date, a solution is not at hand.

The problem, verified by many, is that when updating to the new software, Wi-Fi connectivity on the iPhone 3G either decreased or vanished entirely. Those who were used to getting full bars of Wi-Fi connectivity now experience markedly less bars. Worse, even if some signal strength bars are displayed, often there is no Internet connectivity.

Many solutions have been proposed including resetting the router, changing settings (seemingly at random), and even putting the 3G in the freezer:

"Also i might note, I turned off wifi, turned off the phone, put it in the freezer (in a bag) for 10 mins, turned the phone back on, put the phone right next to my wifi antenna and then turned on wifi and it joined, it JUST joined and I couldnt believe it," says one forum poster. Several others report similar results, but this fix did not last long. In fact, blog posts have been written about possible solutions, but none of them seemed to pan out after using Wi-Fi for a short period of time.

Some writers have said that the 3.1 update will fix the problem while a larger number say that the new software release won't help at all.

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Ah, summertime; the kids are out of school, the pace drops back from 'overdrive' to 'merely hectic,' and you finally have the opportunity to tackle the giant looming crisis that is your personal state of disorganization. Perhaps I'm projecting a little bit. Anyway, if you're looking for a bit of guidance on how your Mac can help you get organized -- and, of course, if you are a Microsoft Office 2008 owner -- the Mac BU has something for you.

Organization expert Peter Walsh (possessor of a charming Australian accent, and author of the slightly-less-charmingly titled Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat) is the host of a video tips presentation over at the Mactopia site. Walsh runs through a couple of suggestions for reducing the chaos in the three key areas of Family, Finance & Health, mostly on the straightforward side (keep a family calendar in Entourage, track your website logins in a secured Excel spreadsheet). Walsh encourages us to envision the end state of the life we want instead of the many steps that may be required to arrive there.

Unfortunately, the delivery mechanism for these helpful tips is a bit less than helpful. The presentation requires the Silverlight plugin, which lots of folks avoid on principle. You can neither download nor rewind the segments; it would seem that for anything intended to help you reduce chaos and clutter, providing the tips in podcastable and mobile-friendly formats would be a nice gesture towards the overscheduled.

On top of that, the tips seem a bit forced into Office's capabilities rather than organically built. While there are more optimal Mac or iPhone single-purpose apps for these tasks (or even multitaskers like Bento), it's true that Office is installed on a lot of Macs and a lot of Mac users could probably leverage it to achieve some organizational goals.

With all that in mind, if you feel like you could use a light organizational boost and you enjoy making spreadsheets of your car maintenance appointments, check it out.

Update: One thing I meant to mention but forgot: Entourage is a bit of an odd choice for a familial calendar, as it doesn't offer native sharing outside of an Exchange environment (an unlikely setup for parents & kids). Adding BusySync makes it much more flexible, but you're just as well off using iCal in that situation.

[h/t The Loop]

I hadn't really noticed, but it turns out there are lots and lots of postcard apps in the App Store. It makes sense, the iPhone (and to an extent, the iPod touch) is a great virtual postcard device. Snap a photo while on vacation, add a quick message and send it off via e-mail, all from within the iPhone itself. It's actually a neat example of old and new communication methods fusing together.

Yesterday, Steve looked at Postcard Express and today I'm looking at Freeverse's Postman 2.0 (iTunes link). Released just a few weeks ago, Postman was one of first applications to take advantage of some of iPhone OS 3.0's capabilities, Google Maps integration and mail sheets.

With Postman 2.0, Freeverse has redesigned the interface (using the talents of the Iconfactory's David Lanham), added themes, made it easier to position text and improved stability with other services.

The Basics

Like most other postcard apps, Postman 2.0 lets you take an image from your iPhone's camera, a stored image on your iPhone or iPod touch or use a pre-loaded professional image as the basis for the "front" of your card. Postman also integrates with Google's Location API and can use your current location to get a Google Map that can then be uses as your image.

Themes and Text Effects

Postman 2.0 now includes a bunch of pre-configured themes that you can apply to your image.

The themes are pretty nice, adding a bit of kitsch and polish to the digital postcard experience. My favorite was the retro TV set that frames your location. Clicking on the theme applies it to your photograph instantly.

You also have access to various text styles using a variety of fonts, including MarketFelt, Helvetica and Times New Roman. You can adjust the size of the text, as well as the color. You can then move the text around the front of your postcard to position at will. If you don't want any text, just clear the text form.

When it comes to the back of your postcard, you can adjust the font and sizing there as well. You can also change the weather indicator, depending on conditions or your mood.

You can disable the front or the back of the virtual postcard, which is nice if you just want to send a little stylized note, or you just want to share a quick vacation picture.

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It's getting to be the 'in' thing for Colleges and Universities. The University of Florida at Gainesville is now requiring incoming pharmacy students for the fall semester to have either an iPhone or an iPod touch.

The student Newspaper, the Alligator, quotes the College of Pharmacy Dean William Riffee saying:

"These are the instruments at the forefront that are developing applications for medical uses by the hundreds. We want our students to become adept at using these mobile devices early on because we see this as the future in pharmacy practice."

The Dean also owns an iPhone so he knows of what he speaks.

In May, the University of Missouri School of Journalism also required the popular Apple devices, saying they would be helpful for recording lectures and other academic uses.

This is obviously a good thing for Apple, and the University thinks it is a good thing for students. It's not so good, however, if you already own a Zune.

Thanks to Billy S. for the tip

There's a thread on Apple's Discussion Boards this week regarding trouble with the latest MacBook Pros with 7200RPM drives. Specifically, the machines are clicking (most users report the click as coming from the drive's location) followed by a beep that's, as far as anyone can tell, not coming from the speaker, as demonstrated above. It's quiet in the video, so crank up the volume and listen closely. Finally, its occurrence is unpredictable.

No clear answer has been reached yet, but Other World Computing (OWC) shared some relevant information with MacNN:

"The issue may be with Seagate's Momentus 7200.4 G-Force hard drives ... Affected units are said to spin up and down frequently, which may be generating the sounds reported by users ... The G-Force technology is said to be mostly irrelevant on Macs in the first place, as a result of pre-existing anti-shock protection."

No one at the TUAW offices has one of these machines, so we haven't experienced the problem. If you have, let us know in the comments and we'll see what we can dig up. Thanks, and good luck.

One movie. One iPhone. One app. One blogger. That was the scenario last night when I put RunPee for iPhone to the test. Available from Rock Software (iTunes Link) for $0.99, RunPee lets you know which points in a given movie that are safe to miss.

When word of this app first hit TUAW, it inspired a lively discussion about the appropriateness of missing any part of a movie. Our own Christina Warren argued passionately that to do so would take you out of the movie, even if you never got up and left. Other, smaller-bladdered bloggers, welcomed the idea saying that if you had to go, it was better to go at a time where less was happening on-screen.

Since I knew I was going to be seeing Star Trek, I volunteered to put the software to the test. RunPee provides a timed list for most of the newest releases, Star Trek among them. I took my iPhone and headed off to the Cinema.

So how did things go? Well, to be frank, not as well as I'd hoped. First of all, the RunPee software provides a list of times and cues, so you know when to head loo-wards. For example, at nearly an hour into the movie, one character says to another to take the con. Notice that I do not mention which characters are involved.

RunPee is not that discreet. In fact, its relatively short list of times and actions can be seen as a series of movie spoilers. There's no timed/reveal of each successive break so I was inadvertently spoiled from the start by several big plot developments, which are all shown on-screen at once.

In use it's also really hard to track the suggested break times. The app comes with a built-in timer but no other cues. You cannot stick the iPhone in your pocket and wait for alarmed vibrations, pulling it out to see if you're at the proper place or not. This feature is not in the software. Instead, you have to keep unlocking the screen and checking the time. It feels like work and it's really annoying to the people around you who keep getting flashed by the lit iPhone screen.

To use this application, you need Internet access. There's no way to download the data and then read it later offline. If your theater has poor cell reception, you're out of luck.

In short, RunPee does not yet bring anything to the table that a spoiler website couldn't. Yes, you get access to pre-timed lists that you could possibly use to service bladder interruptus but between the difficulty of use, the annoyance to other patrons, and the outright spoiling of movie points, RunPee didn't do what I had hoped. So points to Christina, who argued exactly that.

In e-mail, the developer has promised to add vibration support and is working on improving the product in other ways. For now, if you don't mind spoilers and you want to avoid the whole crazy astronaut woman syndrome, RunPee may supply the information you want. And the movie? Thumbs up. One of the better Star Trek offerings.

Name: Run Pee Mobile (iTunes link)
Developer: Rock Software
Platform: iPhone or iPod touch
Price: 0.99

According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple Korea has issued a recall of 1st generation iPod nanos in South Korea. Some units have had a problem with overheating batteries, causing damage to the units and on some occasions the users themselves.

On June 25th, the Korean Agency for Technology and Standards prompted Apple Korea to issue the recall. Apple later released a statement reassuring owners of current-model nanos:

"Although the overheating problem doesn't affect the batteries that are being used now in iPod nanos, concerned customers can get a replacement battery."

If you're a nano owner in South Korea, you may be eligible for this recall. Check with your local retailer and good luck.

The following app is rated for mature audiences. Reader discretion is advised.

I just had to write that, because, in the spirit of liability, Drinkspiration by Absolut (iTunes link) made me confirm my birth date upon initial launch. That, and I'd have a major guilt trip if little Jimmy went out on an all-night drinking bender because some iPhone app encouraged him to do so.

Like legions of apps before it, Drinkspiration aims to solve an age old question that has dogged mankind: What drink should I get? And while some like featured apps provide similar functionality, it's Drinkspiration's delivery that sets it apart from the crowd.

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Here's another augmented reality iPhone app that might be slightly more useful for those of us outside of London than the Nearest Tube app we showed off the other day. TwittARound is a Twitter client (currently in beta) for the iPhone that uses your location info, compass, and the 3GS' video camera to place tweets close to your location in a realtime video view, so that the effect you get is like pop-up notes on the landscape. Very cool indeed. Unfortunately, it seems many of these AR (augmented reality) apps may never see the light of day, as some developers are saying Apple doesn't provide any public API calls for the live video (hence this petition from the burgeoning AR community).

There are other issues here too, though, even if Apple does open up all of the APIs needed for a project like this. Twitter doesn't actually include location information with each tweet, so what you're actually seeing (I'd imagine) is the location of each Twitterer. What you'd like to do with an app like this is walk around and use it to get information about what you see (look through the app at a line outside a concert hall, for instance, and see people talking about who's playing inside). But unfortunately, unless they have some way of seeing exactly where those tweets come from, they'll all still be from each Twitterer's location, not where the tweet was actually sent.

But maybe Twitter or some other app can start including that location (Brightkite is already location-based, and works with Twitter), and then we can get real-time information from where we actually are on an AR screen like this. There's still a few obstacles, but once those are evened out, the possibilities are very exciting.