Unfortunately, the classic mobile game of Dope Wars (I played hours of it on my old TI-80) still hasn't been allowed on the App Store -- Apple reportedly wasn't happy with the drug-themed gameplay, and so there are only "sugarcoated" versions there now (including one that is literally about sugar, branded as Candy Wars). But Zynga, makers of Scramble Live, have now released a game called Mafia Wars, which brings the same kind of premise: you're a mob boss, and you buy and use firearms to get money and all sorts of illegal items. The gameplay isn't exactly the same (rather than selling for higher and lower prices, you're "doing jobs" that cash out earned points for money), but Mafia Wars goes a little farther than Dope Wars, too, in that, since the game was originally created on MySpace and Facebook, you can "fight" against other players and win cash from them, too.

Don't expect to see any of Grand Theft Auto's 3D graphics or storyline (for that, you can go try Payback) -- this is a strictly turn-based button pressing simulation. But it's got quite a life of its own on Facebook already, so it's well balanced and fun for a few pick-up-and-play minutes at a time. It's free right now on the App Store, though Zynga says there'll be "premium versions" (whatever that means) that cost from $10 to $40 (whatever that means) available soon.

Jake Marsh sent along this neat screencast of an iPhone web app for MySpace that he's working on. Facebook basically seems to be the gold standard of social networking web apps these days, and this looks basically just like that one. It is cool that you can look up people right away, but the real improvements are on MySpace's Music pages -- not only can you subscribe directly from the profile, but he's also got it working to play all the music there (usually trapped in Flash, though there is a less easy way around it already). He also says that it might eventually be possible, for songs that are available for download, to get them with one click into the iPhone's iPod library.

Yes, it looks just like Facebook (in fact, it looks like a rip of the mobile site), but why fix something that's not broken? Unfortunately, Marsh is just showing off -- he says that it's just for him right now and he's aiming for an open beta in August. He should probably aim for a little sooner than that: after June, we might all be saying "what web apps?"

Ohai ZOMG. Realz! MySpace can has fab nu Music cheezburger. Wurks with iPod, all 4 awzom Muzik labels! Dayz wil haz MP3 for $$. "MySpaceMusic" so kyoot! Universal Music/MySpace fwends -- bai bai "copyright-infringement lawsuit" for realz. iTunes ftl. MySpace ftw. kthxbai.

These guys didn't actually send these costumes in for our Halloween costume gallery, but if they had, we would definitely have put them in it. They actually have LCD TVs strapped to them (using PVC pipe and ratchet straps), and apparently those TVs are hooked up to real video iPods-- they edited the display video themselves. The suits also weigh about 60 pounds, which is about how much candy you'll probably be able to get if you really do go around the neighborhood in one of these.

And it's a pretty good representation of the iPhone, too, even if it is a little... bulkier than the real thing. These guys are award-winning, too-- one of their Myspace pages brags that they've won the "Guavaween costume contest," whatever that is. Congrats!

[via Neatorama]

Think getting music from the WiFi store on your iPhone would be cool, but frustrated that they haven't implemented it yet? Justin sent along a simple little tip that makes it easy to grab all the music you want off of Myspace band pages, even without Jobs' Starbucks integration.

Lots of Myspace band pages offer little Flash-based widgets that will play music for you, but without Flash, MobileSafari won't let you at them. But with a web application like file2HD, getting at those music files is easy-- plug in the Myspace URL, choose Audio, agree to the Terms of Service, and boom, you get a list of URLs, that, like any other Quicktime-playable media online, will stream directly into the iPod's music player.

There is, of course, a catch. According to the Terms of Service for file2HD (or any other service like it, I'd imagine), you can only access your own pages. Myspace, obviously, wants you visiting their page to hear that music. Listening to it on your iPhone will definitely violate the ToS that you agree to. Not that anyone should care-- most bands put this music on their Myspace page to promote themselves, and so it's likely that they want you listening to the music no matter how you hear it. So as long as you can justify your way past that little conundrum, you're home free. Listen on (at least until the iTMS WiFi store lets you get music cleanly and legally from wherever you are).

Thanks, Justin!

Late last week it was reported that Apple is now blocking access to MySpace pages from computers in the Apple Store as a means of preventing cyber-loitering. Apparently some 'customers' have been hogging both the iSights and the bandwidth the stores provide and impeding the free flow of shiny, glossy, well-designed commerce.

As I am neither a teenager, the parent of a teenager (thank mighty Isis!) nor an indie-geek-folkie musical sensation, the MySpace phenomenon has largely passed me by. I did attend a meeting once where MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe was presenting, and I recall thinking that the News Corp buyout had enabled him to get himself some REALLY nice shoes. I imagine the collective 'talk to the hand' from Apple retail will bother the MySpacies a little bit, but I doubt it will reduce either company's cool factor dramatically.

[via ThinkSecret/CNET Crave]

All the people hanging out on MySpace looking for friends make me sad. A great programmer turning to MySpace looking for love for his project makes me sadder, especially when the project in question is arguably one of the most useful OpenSource projects out there for OS X. Nevertheless, Sherm Pendley sent the following around to the macosx Perl list early this morning:

Well, I've finally given into peer pressure and created a MySpazz
account and CamelBones group:

<http://groups.myspace.com/CamelBones>

I'm getting a bit discouraged because CamelBones isn't gaining much
traction, and that leads to lack of motivation, which leads to not a
whole lot (well... nothing) getting done, which leads to not many new
users, which leads to... you get the idea. I'm looking for ways to
gain some new users, some new ideas, and generally psyche myself up
for the push to Leopardville.

Maybe some networking through MySpazz will help. And who knows - it
may even turn out that tons of people are using it, only I just don't
know about 'em.

sherm--

For those of you who aren't familiar, CamelBones is an Objective-C framework that allows projects written in Perl to be easily wrapped in Cocoa GUIs. You could also think of it as a way for Cocoa programs to access Perl objects (and therefore that magic repository of all that is good in data manipulation and socket programming: CPAN). Either way, CB has made many programmer's lives much, much easier and helped secure Perl's place as an indispensable weapon in OS X programmers' arsenals.

So if you're a CB user and have a MySpace account, drop by the group. Say "hi" and maybe contribute a couple of those new ideas he's looking for.

A malicious QuickTime movie made the rounds across MySpace profiles last weekend, altering user profiles and changing links on their pages to redirect to phishing websites crafted to look like MySpace logins. The movie, CNET reports, actually capitalized on a MySpace flaw and QuickTime's legitimate support for JavaScript to craft what has been dubbed the Quickspace attack. It is also worth noting that while this movie could infect users who simply viewed a compromised page, the attack (as far as we know) only works on IE and Firefox in Windows (in other words: if you're on a Mac, you can resume your regularly scheduled MySpace obsession).

Yesterday, MySpace's chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam contacted Apple to request a fix to plug the hole, even though it was a flaw of MySpace in combination with a legit feature of QuickTime that caused all the damage. Apple is reportedly working on a fix, but for now the two companies have ironed out some workarounds, such as blocking all the phishing URLs and scrubbing their network for compromised profiles.

On a side note: what exactly does one gain from harvesting MySpace account logins? Wouldn't oh, say, credit card numbers be a little more productive? I know there's a lot of kids out there who bank on whether they're in some people's top 8 spaces, but I'm still having a hard time seeing how or why phishers would deal in the same currency.

Thanks Daniel

I'd heard that MySpace was the place to see and be seen for hipsters of all ages, but isn't the iPod nano a bit young to be on MySpace? Apparently not.

Tyler tipped us off that while he was innocently trawling MySpace last night he noticed that iPod Green Nano was the featured profile. Didn't take long to locate Green's closest friend, iPod Pink Nano and iPod Blue Nano. Each of them has more than 1500 friends already, by the way, and with the prevalence of Podophiles rumored to be on MySpace, I'm sure that number will only grow.

The iPod nano profile pages contain links to buy iPods, of course, along with a photo gallery, videos of the commercials, free iPod nano screensavers, desktop wallpapers and even MySpace profile skins. I'm not the MySpace type so I have no idea how effective this advertising model is, but I suppose it can't hurt.

In trying to locate other possible Apple-sponsored profiles I replaced /pinknano at the end of the URL with /rednano. In case you were curious, the rednano URL is already taken by a young red-headed girl in FL. I wonder if Apple has tried (or would try) to buy or rent her profile from her?

Thanks, Tyler!

UPDATE: As of 1pm ET, the nano profile pages are now MIA from MySpace but we're not sure why. Since we're the curious types we've dropped MySpace an email to find out.

UPDATE: As of 2pm ET the profile pages are back online. Go figure! Enjoy~

Spyder is an interesting concept: an app that leverages the APIs of allows you interact with and manage social networks from within the power of the Mac OS X environment. If you're a chronic social networker, Spyder might (eventually) allow you to speed up your obsessive profile checks so you have a better chance at getting outside for once. The reason I say 'eventually,' however, is because Spyder isn't without its shortcomings.

First and foremost is the fact that the language at Spyder's site makes it sound like it will (eventually) work with more than one network, but for now, it only shakes hands with MySpace. While it allows users to manage more than one account (for example: if you run a band or an org in addition to a personal account), it doesn't let you do much more than browse friends and their friends, send messages and leave comments. No blogging, no iPhoto integration for picture posting, no vlogging, etc. While these missing features (hopefully) might arrive in a future version, there is still the glaring problem of price: Spyder is $40. Now I'm not really a fan of MySpace (though yes, I succumbed to peer pressure and opened an account in the hopes of silencing my friends), but $40 sounds way, way too high of a price for the minimal convenience it offers above going directly to the site itself. I could see $10, maybe $15, but $20 and above for Spyder - in its current state of minimal, MySpace-only features - is just too much to ask. I think the developer would get a lot more attention if he/she offered the app at a discounted price during its present feature-maturing state, while simultaneously promoting what features are coming, and how the price will increase through development (commercialism 101: people love a sale, and they love to know what they can get for their money in the near future). I've seen other developers have success with this open promotion and development method, and Spyder could really capitalize on this due to the relative cornering of its particular market; I've never seen another (potentially) full-fledged social networking app like this.

Long story short: Spyder is a great idea and it has a lot of potential, but I can easily see its price knocking it off many potential customers' wishlists. It will be interesting to see how Spyder evolves in the future.

[Update: readers have noted in the comments that MySpace, for some mind-boggling reason, doesn't have an API, while others like Facebook, Flickr and Upcoming do, making it much easier for 3rd parties to make apps like this. My gut reaction as to why Spyder stuck with MySpace for its launch is probably because of its massive popularity.]

MySpace has joined the recent crowd of iTunes wanna-be's. MySpace announced Friday that before the end of 2006 it will give unsigned, independent bands a place to sell their music. Musicians will be able to sell tunes on their own MySpace pages and on fan pages. And here's the best news--the MP3's sold at MySpace will not be shackled by DRM and will work on the iPod and other music players. Prices will be set by the individual bands, who will pay a "small" distribution fee to MySpace.

MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe told Reuters: "The goal is to be one of the biggest digital music stores out there. Everyone we've spoken to definitely wants an alternative to iTunes and the iPod. MySpace could be that alternative."

Whether a MySpace music store is a real threat to iTunes Music Store is anybody's guess, but I'd say it's unlikely. On the one hand, independent, unsigned artists, no matter how good they are, are not direct competition for established musicians who have the backing of the powerful music industry. And iTMS is so entrenched as the place to go for music downloads that it will be hard to unseat.

On the other hand, in its favor, MySpace has a huge potential customer base for indie music. It's been ranked as the #1 most visited site on the Web and is wildly popular with teens, who are a great market for undiscovered bands. It will have lots of music to offer from three million independent bands. MySpace differs from other iTunes challengers, like Microsoft Zune, and the newly announced Samsung music subscription service, because its offerings won't be locked up by DRM, and MySpace is not controlled by the recording industry (although it is backed by powerful parent company News Corporation).

Should Apple be watching its back? What do you think?

You might not know who Adam Betts is, but you've probably seen, or at least heard of, some of his work which includes the icon of a pretty famous Mac OS X chat client: Adium. The animated, quacking duck icon has made a bit of a name for itself, and Phill Ryu (of MacThemes and Widget Machine fame) decided to sit down with Adam Betts and quack ecstatic about the icon's past, present and future. Check it out for Adam's take on everything from Apple's icon guidelines (believe it or not, they have them) to whether Adiumy the Duck will get his own MySpace profile.

[via diggdot.us]