The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

A few years ago getting video on a cellphone would have seemed out of the question. Now you can not only shoot passable videos with your iPhone 3GS, you can even edit them in style. What better way to capture those holiday moments without dragging around a lot of equipment?

ReelDirector [iTunes link] has updated the popular iPhone editor to version 2. The U.S. $7.99 app from Nexvio now allows you to do multi-track sound editing and mixing, use stills in addition to video and do a Ken Burns effect. You can also trim and split imported clips. Owners of the older version can update to version 2 for free.

Other features include the ability to change the length of opening and closing titles, and automatic flip of clips that came in upside down.

I kind of marvel that you can do this all in a phone, but you can and it works pretty well. When you are done you can email your finished video (there are limits to the size of videos you can mail) or just put in in your camera roll and export it later.

There are still some weaknesses to the app. The biggest is an inability to use iTunes music for background sound. Apple does not allow this on the iPhone, but they do allow it in iMovie on the Mac. Go figure. You can record sounds live of course, and always hold the iPhone up to a speaker to get some music, but that is a pretty low-tech way to get that done. The Ken Burns effect is limited to one simple zoom-in. You also can't title projects in the middle, only at the beginning and the end. Documentation is pretty slim, and the linked video of instructions is for version 1, not version 2.

Having said all that, ReelDirector is a remarkable app. No, it's not Final Cut Pro, but it runs on a dang phone! The developers are very responsive to customer suggestions, and this update added a lot of asked-for features. If you want to get those pictures of Uncle George eating his turkey dinner edited and sent out before dessert is served -- and without leaving the table -- you can do it.

What a world.

After seeing that yellow sticky for just a little while, Apple has posted the Black Friday specials in the US store. The products on sale include:

• iMacs (21.5 and 27 inch) and MacBook Pros (13, 15 and 17 inch) are discounted $101, and start from $1098.
• You can save $11 on an iPod nano, which can be purchased from $138 today.
• You can also save $21 on a 8GB iPod touch, $31 on an 32GB iPod touch and $41 on a 64GB iPod touch.
• You can get an Apple TV for $208, a savings of $21.

There's also discounted prices on software, Mac accessories, iPhone and iPod accessories, so there's something hopefully for everyone.

Warning: some NSFW lyrics on the music in the video above.

What do you get when you combine an old Xbox with OS X and some Mac Pro level hardware? This monstrosity. Built by Will Urbina, the OS Xbox Pro is a hackintosh casemodded into an original Xbox dev kit, with some crazy hardware under the hood, including a pair of 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550s, an NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT card, 8GB of RAM, an 16GB solid state drive, and four traditional hard drives -- one boots Windows 7, the other one does OS X (Snow Leopard, we believe -- he bought a copy retail), a Ubuntu install in there somewhere, and two other sweet hard drives for video editing.

And here's the wacky thing: Total material cost of the system is under $1500. That, combined with the video above, almost makes me want to spend a month of weekends trying to do something like this myself (aside from, you know, fitting it into a dev kit Xbox thing -- although fitting it into an old Macintosh might be a fun build, too). At any rate, awesome build for sure.

While you have to go to quite some lengths to be vulnerable to it, jailbroken iPhones have been under fire for susceptibility to a particular SSH-based type of worm that has seen a lot of press lately. One of the developers, Ashley Towns, who helped to get the "rick" rolling, as it were, has just announced his employment at an iPhone game firm.

Sophos is reporting that he'll be taking up shop at mogeneration, the developer responsible for such hits as Xumii [iTunes link], a cross-social networking communication app, and Moo Shake! [iTunes link], a farm-based activity game for kids. It is an interesting turn of events given that mogeneration even reported on the topic of Ashley's now-infamous rickrolling iPhone worm.

I personally think that there is a lot of potential for coders of malware to embark on legitimate careers as developers coding for good. However, I don't favor the thought that malware developers are essentially getting 'rewarded' for their dangerous work. There is nothing from mogeneration to imply that Towns was hired based on the notoriety of his SSH-based worm, but I can't help thinking that there are other, more talented iPhone developers who have stayed below the radar by not writing malware.

I want to know what you think. Should developers of intentionally malicious software be given a clean slate and a new life? Or perhaps should they be feeling the effects of the law's very long arms?

[via Techmeme]

Back when the iPhone Developer Program was first announced, developer provisions (the 'permission slips' that allow developers to distribute pre-release builds of apps in progress) lasted one year. It seemed natural to have a one year expiration, as our developer memberships also lasted one year.

Everything was all fine, developers created new provision profiles as they grew, and each lasted one year. However, sometime in May of this year, provision profiles seemed to start expiring after 90 days. At first, many thought this was linked to the expiration time of their iPhone developer memberships, which would decrease the time to use a provision.

However, it seems that it's been set that provisions are only going to last 90 days. Also, distribution provision profiles, which are needed to submit applications to the App Store or distribute applications via ad-hoc, now only last about six months instead of one year.

If your provisions are expiring, your iPhone will remind you to renew your provision, and will state when that provision will expire.

If this is the way it's going to be, we may have to live with it -- it's just something that I would like to stay consistent, rather than wondering every time I renew a provision whether Apple has swapped out its stopwatch again.

Sometimes Auntie TUAW gets emails from anxious iPhone developers. In this case, the correspondent is running into issues with Apple's new automated checks for private API use in iPhone apps.

Dear Auntie TUAW,

I got an email from Apple's App Review team saying the code in my iPhone app uses private APIs. They pointed to -setOrder, which is a method I created in code, and -setThumbnail, which was created automatically from a Core Data property.

But those are all from my own code, and thumbnail is actually a property for my CoreData class. Any idea why? I don't even have a setter for thumbnail, it is just a dynamic property for the CoreData class.

I don't want to rename my properties because I'm not sure that CoreData will automigrate my renamed items and my users are going to start crying if everything breaks.

Love & snuggles,

Lauren

Read on for Auntie's reply.

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As Victor mentioned yesterday, for the next few days we'll be featuring daily deals from our friends at DealNews.com. Lots of good stuff today, so why not get started browsing for Christmas gifts on stuffing day? Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

• Walmart: [Black Friday] Walmart Thanksgiving Day Sale live now
• Best Buy: [Black Friday] Best Buy Thanksgiving Weekend Sale: Netbooks from $180, more
• MacMall: [Black Friday] MacMall 72 Hour Apple Black Friday Sale: Up to 25% off Apple systems after rebate
• RadioShack: [Black Friday] Radio Shack Shack Friday Sale live now
• Sam's Club: [Black Friday] Sam's Club Black Friday Sale live now
• JR: [Black Friday] JR.com posts Black Friday Sale
• 6ave: [Black Friday] 6th Avenue Electronics Thanksgiving Day Sale live now
• DicksSportingGoods: [Black Friday] Dick's Sporting Goods Black Friday Doorbuster deals now live
• iTunes Music Store: [iPhone / iPod Apps] Gameloft iPhone / iPod touch Apps: Real Tennis 2009, Blades of Fury, more for 99 cents each
• Lowe's: [Black Friday] Lowe's Super Friday Sneak Peek Sale live now
• GoGamer: [Black Friday] GoGamer Black Friday Madness: Deals from 1 cent + $3 s&h
• iTunes Music Store: [iPhone / iPod Apps] CoPilot Live North America for iPhone downloads for $20

Happy holiday, and welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we've got questions about upgrading an iMac processor, using the 27" iMac as a display, sharing a Magic Mouse and Bluetooth keyboard with a Linux machine, and more.

As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions.

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Back when the iPhone was first announced, there was no SDK, you'll remember. Jobs said that developers could just make web apps, and that they would be good enough. Of course, he was wrong -- given what you can do with your iPhone now compared to what you could do with your iPhone then, even Steve would be happy to say that yes, there is a native app for that. But let's not toss the projects out with the development platform, so to speak. Neven Mrgan, one of the devs over at Panic, has released Pie Guy, a free and surprisingly full-featured game for the iPhone that exists only as a Javascript web app. To play it, just point your iPhone 3GS (the page says you need one of those, and while I was able to play it on my 1G, it was too clunky to enjoy) to mrgan.com/pieguy, add that page to your homescreen, and there you go.

In case you haven't guessed from the pic above (or the name), the game itself is a straightforward Pac-Man clone. But what's most interesting here is the example this game sets. Think about it: a full featured, automatically updated game release, delivered straight to the iPhone without any approval required by Apple. The revenue model might need some work, but maybe we dismissed this whole "web app" idea a little too quickly. For devs looking to go around the App Store's process, maybe there's a solution here. Boy, Flash sure would help with that, wouldn't it?

In case you're itching to use that new 27" iMac as a big display for a MacBook, DVD player, or some other device -- and assuming your new unit isn't one of the ones that has shown up DOA or with a cracked screen corner -- Apple has released a knowledge base article gives you the scoop on how to do it all.

The article, titled "Using a 27-inch iMac as an external display" outlines how easy it is to accomplish this:

1. Make sure both computers are turned on and awake.
2. Connect a male-to-male Mini DisplayPort cable to the Mini DisplayPort on each computer. The 27-inch iMac will enter Target Display Mode and display content from the source computer.
   Note: If you are connecting two 27-inch iMacs, connect a Mini DisplayPort cable to each computer and press Command + F2 on the 27-inch iMac keyboard that you will use as an external display.
3. To leave Target Display mode, press Command + F2 on the keyboard of the 27-inch iMac that is in Target Display mode. To return to Target Display mode, press Command + F2 again.

The post goes on to describe special conditions that may affect use of Target Display mode, and notes that third-party converters may be used to provide the Mini DisplayPort compliant signals needed for this mode.

Have any of you used a 27" iMac as an external display for another machine or device? Let us know by leaving your comment below.