I nabbed Pixelmator last week as part of the Macheist bundle, and I have to say that it's quickly become my photo editor of choice for blogging-- it's quick, beautiful, simple, and perfect for what I need. Of course, what I need is mostly just resizing and cropping (with the occasional color fills or quick brushes), so I'm not a pro photo editor by any means, but as the creators said in our interview, it gets the job done.

And with the new patch 1.1.2, just released today, it gets the job done even better. The patch offers quite a few bug fixes, and a short list of interface tweaks and improvements. Selection tools have been beefed up, as have those color fills (they work in real-time, unlike before, you know, when they worked in fake-time). The update is now available for download over on the site, or should show up in the application as well.

It would seem that the latest iPhone/iPod touch update is doing a bit more harm than good. There have been reports that the 1.1.3 firmware is far less stable than the previous 1.1.2. Some of the problems with 1.1.3 being reported:

• Error message during/after install of iTunes 7.6 and firmware 1.1.3
• Loss of sound output from the iPhone's built-in speakers
• Bluetooth devices that worked with 1.1.2 no longer work
• Mail problems

While these problems certainly don't sound good, there are some remedies that seem to work. For the loss of sound, you can try turning the phone off and then back on or plugging headphones in and out. iPhone Atlas has listed some of the reported iPhone problems and some of the remedies that you can try. As always, be sure to check TUAW often for the latest iPhone news.

The Growl website has been offline since last week due to the developers retiring their server for a new one. I am pleased to say that Growl.info is back online as of today. Growl is the indispensable Mac notification system which allows you to customize the way you see notifications, system-wide.

Tonight, I spoke with Chris Forsythe, one of the developers of Growl. He said that while the site is back up, the SVN and Trac are still down. However, you are now able to download the latest release of Growl on their site. Forsythe also mentioned that the new Growl website design will go live "soon-ish." On his blog, he has a picture of what the new design will look like.

The iPhone elite dev team says they've unlocked 1.1.2. Downloads are here on the Google code site. This is unconfirmed and untested as of right now, but if you just can't wait to get your 1.1.2 iPhone unlocked, there you go. Someone ping us in the comments below and let us know if it works for real.

Not quite as fast as the iPod touch jailbreak, but still pretty darn fast. Your move, Apple.

Update: Thankfully, Ibrahim clarifies in the comments, because I'm not sure I understand myself. The team has basically figured out a way to downgrade 1.1.2 to 1.0.2 or 1.1.1 and unlock it. They haven't actually unlocked the 1.1.2 iPhone, because it hasn't been jailbroken yet, but they have unlocked the new modem firmware.

After a really late night, I had the privilege of being able to test some of the jailbreak software this morning. This is not the final jailbreak software. That will involve using a nice graphical user interface. For now, I'm invited to use the ugly command-line stuff, which is still a great opportunity.

Starting in 1.1.1

The key to the 1.1.2 jailbreak is to prepare your system in 1.1.1 before you upgrade. This meant I had to downgrade from 1.1.2.

I quit iTunes and connected to my iPhone using iPhuc. It's not an especially recent version of iPhuc but it did offer two key features: enterrecovery and filecopytophone. Using iPhuc, I typed "enterrecovery", let my iPhone do exactly that--enter recovery mode--and quit.

Update: Heads up everyone. The general purpose post-upgrade tool has not been generally released. If you oktoprepped and upgraded you are fine--the tool will follow soon--but you really don't want to do that until the tool gets released.

As expected, Apple has finally released its 1.1.2 update for iPhone and, presumably, iPod touch. You can download the ipsw file directly from Apple or upgrade in iTunes. The associated documentation is here.

The clock until a reliable 1.1.2 jailbreak appears begins now. You probably want to wait a bit to upgrade if you've invested time and effort in customizing your 1.1.1 iPhone. At least this time, unlocking does not appear to be a barrier to upgrade--especially if you've used the recent revirginizing and safer unlocking methods.

10:45. My download finally finishes. From what I'm hearing there are no new features other than multilingual support. If you find any, shoot us a tip or a comment.

10:55. My AppSnapped iPhone is upgrading without incident. I do not have an unlocked phone but it was AppSnapped for 3rd party support. Just FYI, I manually downloaded the ipsw zip file, added it to ~/Library/iTunes in the iPhone updates folder. Then I did option-update to select it. So if you're seeing that 1.1.1 is still the current version, you can do your upgrade this way.

11:00 I'm pretty sure that this is the iPod touch 1.1.2 update.

11:05. The new "Connect to iTunes" screen now matches the one from the iPod touch. No pretty Earth picture! I'm now trying to get iTunes to recognize that my iPhone is, you know, attached. It gives me "happy chime" but...then not much. Trying to figure that out now. Oh! Wait! Earth. And waiting for activation. Okay! I'm back in the system and all my contact information is still there. Activated!

I"m looking through the Settings and it all appears to look pretty much like it has always had. I don't really see anything new yet. My International keyboards include English, English (UK)--hah that that isn't the standard "English"--French, German, and Italian.

I'm connected now via iPhuc. I'm jailed again. I can see iPhoneDrive, all my Tap Tap Revolution files, etc. A symbolic link I added before upgrading did not work.

11:10. I look (via iPhuc) at my Ringtones folder. All my normal ringtones are there. I'm going to try to restore the Ringtones.plist file now. Not only does it work but New feature alert. My 4 custom ringtones (1 purchased from iTunes and 3 installed via SendSong) all appear in a separate Custom list. Very nice! I see no reason that this shouldn't work for iToner.

11:15. TUAW Reader AppleTwo asks: "So are your 3rd party apps gone after upgrade, or not?". They are, at this time, gone. However, given that I installed them into /var/root/Applications rather than /Applications, they should still be on the phone, albeit inaccesible.

11:40. The name of the new DMG User Bundle is....Oktoberfest. Perfect for a November release. iPhone users may recall that previous bundles were called Heavenly and Snowbird.

Reader (and former TUAW heavyweight) David Chartier asks: "So where did this download come from?" You can find Apple downloads by issuing curl -s -L http://phobos.apple.com/version | gunzip from the Terminal command-line.

Confirmed: INdependence does not seem to be working. "Unsupported version of phone firmware installed. Detected version is 1.1.2"

Confirmed: Some users have been able to downgrade back to 1.1.1 and 1.0.2.

12:10: Generating header files for the 1.1.2 frameworks now. Like last time, it's a lot of annoying fussy work but the results should be helpful.

12;15: Confirmed. The *#307# trick still works. That's the trick that lets you access Safari from an unactivated iPhone with only emergency dialing capabilities.