Fluent Mobile has released an innovative news oriented iPhone app that may be a game changer. The Fluent Mobile app aggregates mobile ready content from multiple content providers. According to M:Metrics in January of this year, mobile news sites were visited over 63 million times and the number is growing. This is a huge market.

Currently 1.5% of all web content is Google optimized and nicely formatted for mobile devices and the number is increasing. Fluent Mobile takes advantage of this content and aggregates it, creating a news portal with content from Bloomberg for business, ESPN for sports, The Washington Post, CNN, Fox News and USA Today, among others, for news. Upon launch, content will be provided by 32 separate sources and more will be added as relevant sites become mobile enhanced. For the first time an app provides one-stop shopping for news.

The information is organized well, allowing you to choose from a number of categories including U.S. News, Entertainment, Sports, Business, and Travel.

See, now this is the kind of game I want from my iPhone -- the accelerometer isn't just a gimmick thrown in with the gameplay, it's the actual premise of the game. Diorama is a weird little Marble Madness-style maze game, but the catch here is that instead of just tilting the accelerometer to move the ball (which you do), the level of the game actually moves with you, so that you get a stereoscopic kind of effect, as if the stage is real inside your iPhone's screen. Tough to explain, but as soon as you see it above, you'll know what it's like. We've seen this kind of effect before in apps like MotionX's Dice roller, but in this case, it's actually part of the game -- you can only find the paths to take around the stages by actually tilting the device. And for extra 3D viewing, there's an actual 3D mode, so if you happen to have red and cyan glasses around, you can switch on the mode for anaglyphic 3D.

The app is the first iPhone release from a company called Drömsynt, and though the initial reports on iTunes say the game is pretty tough (it is a pain navigating the quickly-moving ball around those pathways), for just 99 cents, it's definitely worth downloading, if only to see how it works. So many apps just throw in a few iPhone-specific features as afterthoughts, but it's refreshing to see a game like this (or like Zen Bound, which really depends on the multitouch screen) rely on the originality of the hardware itself.

Today, Apple announced a ship date and upgrade pricing for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. 10.6 will debut this September as an upgrade for Mac OS X Leopard users for just $29. "We've built on the success of Leopard and created an even better experience for our users from installation to shutdown," said Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering in an Apple Press Release. "Apple engineers have made hundreds of improvements so with Snow Leopard your system is going to feel faster, more responsive and even more reliable than before.

Snow Leopard features include built-in Microsoft Exchange 2007 support along with a slicker install process, faster applications, and 64-bit versions of standard applications that boost overall performance. Apple brags that "[u]sers will notice a more responsive Finder; Mail that loads messages 85 percent faster and conducts searches up to 90 percent faster; Time Machine with up to 50 percent faster initial backup; a Dock with Expose integration; a 64-bit version of Safari 4 that boosts the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 percent and is resistant to crashes caused by plug-ins."

In addition to the $29 single user upgrade, a family pack upgrade will cost $49. Tiger users will pay $169 for a 10.6/iLife box set or $229 for a family pack.

All users who purchased or will purchase a new qualifying Mac between 8 June 2009 and 26 December 2009 will receive a free upgrade package and pay $9.95 for shipping and handling. You must request your up-to-date upgrade within 90 days of your original purchase.

Snow Leopard requires a minimum of 1GB RAM and runs on Intel-based Macintoshes. Full system requirements are hosted at Apple's tech specs page.

The Sims 3 pretty faithfully recreates the Sims experience on Apple's handhelds, albeit in a more streamlined version. While the handheld port avoids a lot of the new complexity of the latest PC release, the core Sims experience is still here -- you can create a Sim, give it a personality and a house, and then help your little avatar live its life, from going to work to following goals and dreams to completion.

To a relatively new Sims player (I've never been a huge fan of the games), the variety of things to do here is pretty impressive. There's the usual tasks around your house -- eating, cleaning, sleeping, and so on -- but as you play, your Sim comes up with new goals to lust after, and it's your job to make sure those things happen, all while trying to preserve your Sim's health and sanity. For instance, just a minute into playing, my Sim suddenly got it in his head that he wanted to "use someone else's shower" (which seems like an exceedingly creepy goal to have, actually), but instantly I started thinking about all the things I had to do to complete it: go to town, meet someone, get invited to their house, and then somehow find an opportunity to jump in the shower.

I first came across developer NinjaBee by playing their XBLA platfomer Cloning Clyde -- it was a game that seemed pretty genre, until you started playing it and discovered a unique charm and depth. Since then, they've brought that flair to a few other types of games, including the turn-based strategy RPG Band of Bugs and Xbox Live's Kingdom for Kieflings, and now they've arrived on the iPhone by porting their original XBLA spaceport business sim Outpost Kaloki X and renaming it as Kaloki Adventure.

I liked Kaloki on Xbox Live and I still like it on the iPhone. The graphics have taken a hit -- the textures don't seem as clear and the menus are a little more functional than good-looking, but the solid core of gameplay is definitely still here in spades. The idea is that you're running a space station with a limited number of expansion slots on it, and you can put various expansions in each of those slots -- some will give you more power (which you can use to grow bigger expansions), and some will make you more money (which you can use to build more power). The idea is to satisfy your power needs, make money, and keep your customers happy all at the same time, turning your space station from a tiny little lemonade stand off the back end of Jupiter into a thriving powerhouse of space commerce.

Update: Our bad... the date on the MacRumors comment was in late April, and this recycled up into our queue due to an editing mixup. Apologies –Ed.

There's a new iTunes beta version out in developers' hands straight from Apple, and a forum poster over at Mac Rumors found a little something fun in the About screen: a reference to Gracenote's ability to identify Blu-ray discs. Gracenote is the service that IDs your CDs when you import them into iTunes, so you don't have to sit there and type all the track names and artist information in. Apparently Apple is mentioning that not only CDs and DVDs, but also Blu-ray discs, will get information from Gracenote in the latest version of iTunes.

This doesn't mean that Apple will adapt Blu-ray as a standard (though it would probably be about time, don't you think?). But it should mean that the future version of iTunes will include Blu-ray support, so if you happen to have a Blu-ray drive hooked up to your Mac, you'll be able to read or play the discs via iTunes.

It could just mean that Apple has upgraded the Gracenote version in their app, however, and that they have no plans to actually use it -- the text in the About screen could just be a boilerplate cut-and-paste from some required Gracenote documentation that happens to include "Blu-ray." We'll have to wait and see just what shows up in 8.2 when it eventually releases to the public.

Sunday night on the Talkcast, we approached the rumors of a 10.5.7 release coming soon, and all pretty much agreed that yes -- whatever is in it, it's very likely coming soon. Here's another rumble of thunder that hints at the storm: Nvidia announced a brand new card recently for Macs, called the Quadro FX 4800 -- it offers "ultra fast performance," "realistic effect," and tons of triangles and all of the other things that comes along with a video card that looks more like a Flip Mini than an actual set of circuits.

But most importantly, under "Drivers and Downloads," you can see that the Mac drivers require Leopard 10.5.7. Combine that with all of the other speculation flying around, and odds are that we'll see a new version of the OS in Software Update as soon as later today.

Thanks, Daniel N!

The folks at FuzzyCube Software dropped us a note that their first game, iQuarterback, is in the App Store now, and it looks all right -- rather than actually quarterback a game, you mostly just try to hit passing targets. And while the game is pretty barebones right now (it's only 99 cents, and they're planning to add new modes to it in the next version), the most interesting thing about the game isn't what it is, but who's making it: the guys behind FuzzyCube are a few refugees from Ensemble Studios, the legendary developer of Age of Empires that got shut down by Microsoft on the eve of their recent Halo Wars release.

Now that's interesting -- a big time studio forced to close by their corporate overlords is finding new life in iPhone development (FuzzyCube isn't the only studio to come out of the Ensemble breakup -- Robot Entertainment, Bonfire Studios, and Windstorm Studios are all being started by ex-Ensemble employees right now, though FuzzyCube is the only group to have released a game so far). Lots of game developers are facing a crunch right now, and with the iPhone easy and cheap to develop for, we might see even more of these former larger game devs turn to the smaller screen.

Update: My apologies to the folks at Newtoy -- they are apparently the first Ensemble refugees to have released an iPhone game, dropping Chess with Friends in the App Store last December. But the point stands: bigger studios who've been asked to dissolve can seemingly find a nice place developing for the iPhone.

Say, just for the sake of argument, that you're Psystar. You've been served by Apple for selling (they claim) illegal clones of their machines, and selling their OS (which you claim isn't even copyrighted) on illegitimate hardware. Sure, you've won a minor victory in the battle, but generally, the opinion is that you're a dead company walking -- when a company like Apple not only has it out for you but has pretty legit claims to back themselves up, you could be said to be in trouble. And so, what do you do?

Well if you are Psystar, you apparently release more computers. Determined to stick it to Apple as hard as they possibly can before they're legally wiped off the map, Psystar has announced the release of the Open(3), a desktop running OS X and packing up to a 2.53GHz Core2Quad Q8200 processor, up to 4GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, and all of the other usual options you'd want on a machine like this (6x Blu-ray burner, GeForce 9500GT). Technically, the box starts at $599, but as Engagdet notes, even if you max it out to around $2000, you're still paying less than an equivalent Mac Pro.

This is pretty much the computer retail equivalent of Bugs Bunny kissing the hunter. We can imagine Apple's lawyers steaming from the ears at this point -- here's hoping Psystar gets to have their fun while they can.

We've posted about Payback before -- it's a Grand Theft Auto clone that's playable (and pretty impressive) on the iPhone. Apex Designs, the company behind the app, sent us a note that they've updated to version 1.1, and with that update come a nice round of fixes and improvements. As you can see above, the camera angle has been tweaked to take a little more advantage of the 3D engine, the minimap has been beefed up, and the display now rotates as you tilt the iPhone. Looks very nice.

And there's even better news: even if you're not willing to shell out the $5 required for the full app, there's a lite version just released to the App Store -- it lets you explore one of the eleven cities available in the full version. Payback was impressive when released, and only suffered from a few gameplay glitches, but it looks like Apex is committed to ironing those out. It has developed into an even better game than before.

Peggle Nights is now out for Mac. The game costs $19.95 (there's a 60-min free trial available if you just want to check it out), and is as addictive as crack cocaine covered in sugar, drizzled with chocolate, and floating in original formula Coca-Cola. It should probably be illegal for PopCap to release games -- any court would convict them of the mass murder of free time around the world.

Don't believe us? Patrick Klepek over at the MTV Multiplayer blog tried out the game when it showed up on his desk, and let's just say he doesn't have that job any more. Of course, that's unrelated (we think), but still -- PopCap makes some addictive videogames, and Peggle is at the top of the list. Play with caution. And don't forget that the iPhone version of the game is still due out sometime this month.

Apple has now given developers the ability to use promo codes to give away copies of their applications on the App Store. Previously, developers had to build a special version of their application (i.e. Ad-hoc copy) that included a mobile provisioning file and the actual application. These two files were then dragged onto iTunes to install them.

With the Ad-hoc model, developers were limited to giving away 100 copies of their applications. Plus, users needed to find & supply the UDID information for their iPhone/iPod touch. With this change, developers can give away a special code that, when typed into the iTunes Store under the "Redeem" section, will give the user a free (or promotional) copy of the application. However, there are some caveats to using the promotional codes:

• The developer can only give away up to 50 promotional codes per application version
  
• Currently the promo codes can only be used in the US iTunes Store

We're sure that this will fill the gap between developers looking to get reviews and users eager to do the reviewing. Nice work, Apple!


[via MacRumors]