Damn. I was half-way through making this!

Just goes to show, that idea you’ve just had? Someone else has already had it.

Lovely though, and reassuring to see this guy has had as much trouble with the ‘M’ as I was having.

I guess I’ll abandon mine now then.

Not as excited as I was about the iPhone though…

Those images above are genuine Apple prototypes from 1983, the image below however is real, ladies and gentlemen, the first ever Apple Computer from 1976…

Whatever is announced in a couple of hours, it’s sure to be impressive. Steve Jobs has been allegedly quoted as saying it’s the “most important thing I’ve ever done” With rumours ranging from the reinvention of newspapers, to fingerprint identification and impressive gaming capabilities, the idea is that you really DO need another shiny Apple product in your life.

We’ll see.

Please forgive me while I indulge my geek and nostalgia genes simultaneously – it is Friday after all.

Monkey Island has made it to the iPhone ::iTunes Link:: and not just any old Monkey Island, the new Special Edition which landed on PC and xBox360(shudder) last weekend. The game contains the original VGA-tastic version as well as a new improved graphic incarnation (HD on the other formats, slightly less impressive on the iPhone). The new version has a new voiceover track and you can flip between past and present with a swipe gesture at any time. Here’s to many more LucasArts titles on the App Store and to a graphic adventure renaissance!

If you haven’t ever played Monkey Island, it’s an offbeat adventure of piratey proportions. A genuine classic game from the early 90′s with excellent writing and atmospheric gameplay. They really don’t make them like this anymore and now it’s had a new lick of pixelly paint…

If you don’t have an iPhone, you can get the new Special Edition on your dirty PC via Steam or your filthy xBox through XBLA. If you don’t have an iPhone, PC or xBox, check out ScummVM, which lets you play all the old LucasArts adventures on almost any platform. And don’t forget Telltale Games’ new episodic Monkey Island series Tales of Monkey Island…

The iPhone is really starting to come into its own as a bona fide gaming platform, notable recent additions to the App Store with a retro flavour also include Peggle, Worms and Wolfenstein 3D. Doom can’t be far away.

All highly recommended to take the edge of travel on the London Underground network…

Clever advert for the iPod on Yahoo’s website…

Last.fm
Now this is pretty special, if you don’t know last.fm then you’re missing out and I recommend you check it out. The iPhone app is great, the interface is slick and the streaming speed is pretty good on the mobile network. It’s almost instant over Wifi. Now you can listen to practically any music you can think of when you’re out, and it even tells you if there are any gigs and events coming up too. There aren’t many bad things I can say about this app, I guess the frustration at not being able to listen to it in the background is one, and the fact it can’t interact at all with your iPod library is another, but both of those are down to Apple, not the guys over at last.fm. It’s also free.
:: iTunes link ::

Twitteriffic / Twinkle
Hmm, now I really like Twitter and I’ve been able to use it a lot more since the iPhone liberated it from my desktop. I never liked using it from my old mobile phone, and now with the iPhone you can do all sorts of stuff like read everyone’s tweets, reply directly, look at posted images and follow posted links. Once these apps get the new notification system they could start to replace SMS among fellow tweeters. The only problem I’m having is which app to use for my Twitter fix. (There are more than just these two as well). I started with Twitteriffic which is a lovely clean efficient Twitter app. The free version serves up an ad every so often but they’re so pretty it doesn’t matter at all. I like Twitteriffic’s clean presentation, what else would you expect from the guys over at the Iconfactory? It does what I want and doesn’t ever get in my way. Then there’s Twinkle. I only discovered this one recently, it does everything Twitteriffic does but for me it doesn’t look as nice. Maybe a bit too twinkly. Anyway, what marks Twinkle out is the fact you can read nearby tweets courtesy of the iPhone’s GPS functionality. Now I can read a group of people’s tweets who live or work near me, even if I don’t know them. Evenings and weekends are the Wandsworth massif and weekdays are the Farringdon posse. Reminds my of early chat room experiences, I’m a bit of a wallflower you see. Strange but weirdly addictive…
::Twitteriffic:: ::Twinkle::

Facebook
OK, so here it is, Facebook for the iPhone. For a long time I preferred the web app, as it was a lot more functional, but now the Facebook team have put some more development into the native app, it’s coming along nicely. This is another one which will take off when the push notifications are introduced. You can browse through all the usual stuff, and now you can do things like tag pictures etc. It still can’t replace the full site for all that the Facebook platform has on offer, but it’s getting close. Besides, it’s quite nice to just flash it up to read some updates or message someone without having to participate in an 80′s movie quiz or pretend to be a zombie…
::iTunes link::

Tuner
Tuner is a radio streaming app. There are a couple out there but Tuner is the most professional feeling effort and looks the best. It works well, you can browse streams as you’d expect, or you can enter a stream URL manually to listen to. It doesn’t cost very much either and I use it more than enough to justify the purchase price. The only snag for me is the lack of WMA or RealMedia format streams. I’m not sure exactly why this is, but it feels like the iPhone SDK doesn’t permit them which is a shame as it means pretty much the whole BBC repertoire is out of reach. I hope that support for these proprietary codecs is introduced at some point, but I’m philosophical about why they aren’t included now. (some reviewers on the App Store are positively incensed…) It’s also another victim of the lack of background processes so you can’t do anything else on your iPhone while you’re listening. For now it can play me a small selection of some of my favourhite channels and I can browse new ones so I’m happy enough. When I can use it to listen to Adam & Joe on BBC Radio 6 Music I’ll be a happy man.
::iTunes link::

eBay
It took a while to reach the UK, and when it did it was strangely completely incompatible with the 12 hour clock (Which Steve Jobs didn’t even think us Europeans deserved to have at all to begin with) which has led a lot of reviewers to claim it simply doesn’t work. It does work, and since the update it works with the 12 hour clock too. It does what it says on the tin, it serves up eBay listings, searches and My eBay info in an iPhone flavoured wrapper. You’ll still need to use the real eBay site if you’re a hardened bidder or seller, not to mention if you want to pay with PayPal, but for now it’s a great way to search or bid while you’re away from your computer. Retrogaming bargains have never been so accessible!
::iTunes link::

Wikipanion
Lots of people aren’t too sure why you’d need a native iPhone app for Wikipedia when you can visit the site through mobile Safari, but the truth is that the Wikipedia site is a fairly daunting place rendered at such a small type size, and zooming in on what you want to read gets a bit tiresome. I’m a bit of a trivia nut so I often like t look things up. Wikipanion is a nice free way to get at the information clearly on your iPhone.
::iTunes link::

Shazam
This is great. Hold Shazam up to any music that is playing and it is likely to be able to tell you what it is. Not only that but it will give you a link to download it from iTunes, YouTube videos realted to it, and lets you send it to a friend. It doesn’t always recognise obscure stuff, but it’s pretty good and the interface is easy to use. You don’t pay for the service either.
::iTunes::

TubeStatus
A simple little app which tells you what the service status is of all the London Underground lines. It’s pretty accurate and is updated often. It doesn’t help you plan your journey though, or even serve you up a map, but it’s worth a quick check in the morning before setting out and realising you should have caught the bus and it is free. Awful icon though, there’s no excuse for that. Really spoils my lovely home screen…
::iTunes link::

Solitaire City
There had to be some games in here somewhere, and I thought I’d pick one which is a ubiquitous choice on the App Store. I love Patience (sorry, I’m simply NOT going to call it Solitaire) and it’s very addictive. The problem is, a patience game is probably the third thing a developer tries their hand at after their ‘Hello World’ debut and their difficult second app: ‘Flashlight’. Consequently there are a lot of bad versions out there which are bewilderingly popular. There are a lot of good versions too, but just none as good as this. Solitaire City gives you an overwhelming amount of different games to play, the usual Klondike is joined by dozens of others, some of which I’d never even heard of. Discovering the ins and outs of new games is great fun and each game appears in multiple versions so you can play the rules you are used to or vary them. It doesn’t end there because the presentation of this app is miles ahead of the others. It’s spot on, nice to look at but also clear and not fussy (ignore the ludicrous wallpapers shown on the app store, you can set a plain background). Finally, there are global high score tables which add an extra dimension to play, it plays vertically or horizontally, you can listen to your own iPod music and it even has a sense of humour. There is also a free version but I really do recommend the whole enchilada. In fact the only bad thing I could say about it is that I don’t like the cheesy startup screen, but blink and you miss it.
::iTunes link::

Missile Command
OK, so Patience isn’t really a proper game. People want Super Monkey Ball, Spore, Metal Gear Solid and Halo on their iPhones. Well, some of the more amitious iPhone games out there are very good, but some are not. The iPhone isn’t a PSP or a Nintendo DS and some developers haven’t realised they can’t just port a game over and expect it to be playable with no traditional gaming controls. I love retro games and if there is one game which is perfect for the iPhone (apart from Archer Maclean’s Mercury) then it’s the classic Missile Command. Some of the big name games have been disappointing, but this one is spot on. There’s a sexy graphics version and a classic arcade original version (no prizes for guessing which one I prefer) and they play beautifully. It’s all there, the addiction, the frustration and the blind panic. Even the 2 player. A great example of how to do an iPhone port of an old classic. I only wish you could manually select which silo to fire from by gesture but it doesn’t seem to matter once merry nuclear death is raining down…
::iTunes link::

At the least it’s a very cool demo. Come to think of it, there isn’t really a kosher demo scene for the iPhone, would be great to see an experimental visuals section to the App Store full of free goodness, instead of 50 versions of Solitaire…

Thanks to Sean for the link…

Just for today.

There’s also a Rotary Word Clock which is just as lovely, if not more so. Have a closer look by clicking the images above, then get over to the site and download the screensavers for PC and Mac. You can even get an iPhone version if you’ve been brave enough to jailbreak your device.

His portfolio is rather nice too…

Even people who were told they had one coming from O2 via courier as part of Monday’s preorder pantomime didn’t all actually get a phone in the end. Overall I think the launch was a bit of a mess. To top it all off , the credit check facilities crashed too which led to an anxious wait in line while I tried to wrack my brains and work out if I had made any reckless spending decisions recently…

Well, it all turned out OK, and I was only 10 minutes late for work. Early impressions are good, I’m having fun with it so far, but I’m off for a week’s holiday in Cornwall, so it will be getting an extensive field test. I’ll have a stab at a review when I get back…

Just spent the last hour or so listening to the WWDC keynote presentation by Steve Jobs and friends in which the iPhone 3G has finally been unveiled. The relief is palpable, although I’m a little disappointed that my frustration must endure another month of waiting and I won’t be able to buy myself one for my birthday. I deserve it.

Anyway, it looks good, most of the rumours were spot on, 3G, GPS, new casing and a lower price which could be around £100 in the UK. Bit disappointed that there is no front facing camera for iChat and that there’s no 32Gb model. The camera was glossed over too, still the unpopular 2 megapixel job. These may be updated in a revision for the Christmas market, but I’ve waited long enough, and the price is fantastic. I’m all over it like a rash on the 11th of July.

Can’t wait, the App Store is going to be great, the gaming potential is huge, and the new Mobile Me service which replaces .Mac might just be worth the money at last. I really do think it’s going to change my behaviour, and I’ll be very happy to ditch my current phone and finally get rid of Orange, who I’ve definitely fallen out of love with in recent years…