It's official: The iPhone 3.0 firmware is now available. As you wait for your copy to download and install, you'll need something to read -- and we've got a complete walkthrough of the new software. Join us as we take you through most of the new features and how to use them.

Push Notifications
This has been one of the most requested features for quite a while, and in iPhone 3.0, it's finally a reality. Push notifications allow iPhone applications to provide a faux backgrounding service. In our testing, Apple's notification service works so well that you would almost think the application was running in the background.

When you download and install an application that features notifications, you get a new Settings menu called "Notifications." In this panel, you will be able to select, per application, how you would like to receive notifications. You can choose any variety of sounds, alerts or badges. Sounds will be a predefined sound from the application that will sound only if you have the ringer on; alerts will give you a pop-up alert that will either appear on the lock screen or in any application you might be in at the time; badges will give you a counter on the application icon on the home screen.



Spotlight Searching
Quite a few people (including myself) have wanted an app launcher on the iPhone. While Spotlight Searching doesn't make up for the lack of an actual app launching application, it does provide some solace to the app loving iPhone users out there. Spotlight resides on the home screen, taking up one of the screens. When you are on the first home screen, sliding to the right will display the searching interface.

While simple, the interface allows you to type in a name, phrase, or other search terms and have the whole phone searched. Enter a contact, it will display the contact name. Enter a song, it will show the song and allow you to go to the iPod application. Enter a calendar event, and with one click you can view that calendar and the event schedule.

There are some shortcuts and settings that go along with Spotlight. If you want quick and easy access to the Spotlight feature, you can have it automatically launch by double clicking the home button (you can change this setting in Settings > General > Home). Just as you have the ability to order search results in Spotlight on your Mac, Spotlight on your iPhone allows you to do the same type of order. Just navigate to Settings > General > Home > Search Results. From this screen, you can enable/disable certain search results and control the order in which the search results are shown.




Read on to learn more about the iPhone 3.0 software update, and to see more of the new features.

Apple has posted two new videos on its main page. An iPhone Guided Tour introduces the iPhone 3G S model with all its new features. You'll see how to shoot a video and edit it on your iPhone, make calls and play songs using voice commands, get a preview of the 3.0 Spotlight feature in action, and of course check out that cool new compass.

You can also view the iPhone advertisement that was shown to the keynote participants today. Point your browser to the Ads Gallery page. The spy-influenced ad is presented on the front page of the gallery.

Are you caught at work? Unable to spend 25 minutes watching Apple's guided tour video? TUAW to the rescue! Here's our first annotated gallery of shots from the guided tour video for you to peruse as you concentrate on getting the real work in your life done on time. We'll continue adding updates this as our expert video analysts break the guided tour down into little pieces.

Ringer silence switch. A single button on the left side of the iPhone appears to allow you to silence your iPhone ringer.

Sleeping the iPhone. Press the sleep/wake button to sleep your phone. While sleeping, you can receive calls, listen to music, and adjust the volume but nothing happens when you touch the screen.

Waking the phone. To wake up your iPhone you must first press the sleep/wake button and only then slide the virtual unlock slider on the screen.

Home button. The home button at the bottom front of the iPhone takes you back to the home screen. From what we've seen on other videos, it also acts as a "back" or "menu" button depending on the context used.

iPod connector. The iPod dock connector appears at the bottom of the iPhone between the built-in microphone and the speaker. It looks like a standard dock connector which means that if true, you'll be able to use your existing dock to at least power the iPhone.

Powering off. Press and hold the sleep/wake button for "a few seconds" to power down the iPhone and then drag the red slider to confirm.

A while ago we covered Quicksilver plugins for Gmail and Google Calendar, allowing you to send an email or create a new event (respectively) right from within Quicksilver's interface. If you aren't a Google Calendar user though, Quicksilver also offers the same kind of plugin for iCal. Somehow I lost this in my bloggable bookmarks, but last month Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings broke down the syntax for adding an event to iCal with this plugin, and it's really pretty simple. When entering text, the event is written like so:

• name of event - date and time
• name of todo - date and time
• !!! name of todo - date and time (exclamation points add priority. Two for 'important,' three for 'where's the panic button?!')

Tim's post says to type the date and time first, but I've found that this plugin also includes the date and time in the event/todo's title. However, it can still properly place the event if you simply swap the two pieces and type the name first, which allows you to keep more legible event names. Also, this plugin has the handy ability of specifying a calendar to add the new event/todo.

Here's an example of how to make this work in Quicksilver if you're a little confused. Obviously, you need to install the iCal plugin if you don't have it, and you can get it from QS's plugin preference pane. Here's how this breaks down, and I have the steps pictured above:

1. Invoke QS, press period to get a text entry pane, and type something like: "dinner and a movie - 9/30/06 6:00 pm" (sans quotes)
2. Tab over to the second pane where you must specify you want to turn this text into an iCal event. I type 'ic' to find an iCal event, and 'ict' for a todo, but as always with QS, YMMV
3. Tab over once more to have your choice of calendars, and press the right arrow key to get a drop down list of all your calendars, or simply start typing to find one of their names. Fortunately, since you've already chosen a specific action in the middle pane, only your calendars are listed in the third pane

That's it; if you're an appointment and todo junkie, this should take a sizable bite out of your daily mousing. The one catch so far is that it doesn't seem possible to add reminders through this method, but if you find a way, feel free to share with the class.

In case you missed it, one of the big announcements of today's It's Showtime events was iTunes 7, a major update that brought changes on nearly every front. Organizing, shopping, syncing - everything got a lot of attention from Apple's software engineers and, as you'll see throughout this walkthrough, a lot of polish has been applied to make this one of the most significant updates in recent iTunes history.

First up are some of the basics: there has been a simple change to the iTunes Music Store's name; that's right, 'Music' has been dropped from the name, as the introduction today of movies (which we all knew were coming; more on those later), in addition to carrying TV shows for a year now, kind of begged the name change. As you can see, iTunes has also received a new, blue-ified icon. It has now gone from purple to green and now blue which, if you'd like a little bit of design trivia, is the human brain's favorite color to look at.


This should offer a good overview of just how much the iTunes UI has been updated and polished, though impressively without any major or unsettling changes. Dan Lurie noted that it all has a very 'web 2.0-ish' feel, and I tend to agree. Since the iPod was a major player in today's events as well, I figure changes to the iTunes + iPod relationship are as good a place to start as any.

I managed to get Vista running on my MacBook Pro in both a copy of Parallels Desktop and Boot Camp, but this post is only going to cover the Parallels side of things; my Boot Camp post is still in the kettle.

For the most part, I would say Vista runs in Parallels Desktop just 'ok,' as opposed to 'really well' or 'it made an un-switcher out of me.' Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to offer full support for high-end graphics cards yet, so you won't get any of the fancy 3D effects or what I like to call Translucent Everything Technology™ (TET) that Vista boasts.

Read on for a walkthrough of setting up, installing and running Microsoft Windows Vista on your Intel Mac via Parallels Desktop, including some catches to watch out for and just how far you can actually push this software, given Vista's still more or less beta/RC1 status and Parallels' as-yet experimental support.