The announcement you may have missed from yesterday’s Macworld Expo!

Via The Onion

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::

Thank God. New MacBook Pros are out. After my old PowerBook screen disaster, now even the kitchen TV has broken, (probably for the best as doing design on the television was starting to give me a headache) the point is I’ve been very patient – I need a new laptop and I need one badly…

It’s not perfect, while the new machine looks lovely and I’ll be tasting even old features like iSight and BootCamp for the first time, Apple in their infinite wisdom have decreed I must endure an awful glossy screen and that despite my aspirations, I don’t need Blu-Ray after all. None of that makes any difference of course, Steve has got me exactly where he wants me and I’ll be down to the Apple Store first chance I get…

And yes, the component shot above is from the MacBook not the Pro. The MacBook gets all the press…

I just found out about the Web2DNA Art Project, which will analyse any website and create an image of it’s ‘DNA’:

The brightness of the lines is determined by the importance of the tags in terms of structure.

H1 is brighter than H2, which is brighter than H3.
TABLE is brighter than TR, which is brighter than TD tags.
Images and flash elements appear as 70% white.
New HTML tags like STRONG and EM is brighter than older ones like B and I
UL, OL and DL is brighter than their LI, DT, DD
DIV layout is brighter than table layout

Basically a semantically rich site will appear brighter than one with messy old-style code.

The image above is of this site, but you can try it with any URL. For some reason though, it doesn’t work in Firefox…

Thanks to Martin for the link…

Check out this video of some lovely touchscreen game design. Shapes drawn on the screen take on physical properties in the game, it’s lovely. Something this well executed would work brilliantly on the Nintendo DS…

Cheers to Jonny for the link…

I’d love one of these iPod cases. As usual, you can’t buy them, but it can’t be too hard to make one – first stop eBay. Shame to break such a lovely retro Walkman though…

Via ffffound, which came via ipodhacks, which came from apple-touch, which came from gearfuse, which came from dvice, which came from gadgetvenue, which seems to have come from sirljohn’s flickr stream. Thought I’d post all the links, I had to follow the trail to the end, kind of like finding one end of a piece of string…

I just saw this over at Wired. It’s a great explanation of the complexities of the web, and how blogs work for the slightly less technical minded such as myself. It shows just how far your words can go and just how extensive the data machine behind the web really is. It’s presented in a nice way too.

I also checked out Matthew Hurst’s own site, where there are some lovely visualisations of the ‘blogosphere’ making the intangible tangible. Well, in an intangible kind of way…

Found this great visual trace tool on Uneasysilence. It lets you see how the data which makes up your website actually gets to the viewer, through various servers and gateways. It uses Google Maps to show you, so you can zoom around and look at it as a map or a satellite image as usual.

The image here shows the route for holster.co.uk

OK, so you can’t actually find out exactly who is furtively flicking through your holiday pictures, but you can now find out a whole lot more about where your Flickr hits are coming from.

The site just added a stats page for pro users, go ahead and activate it here on your account…

OK, first let’s get something straight – I WANT to buy an iPhone, I really do. I’ve been waiting for this sucker for the best part of a decade and to be honest I think I’ve shown extraordinary and uncharacteristic patience. Now, though, my patience is really going to be tested…

Apple released the iPhone officially in the UK today on the O2 network, so of course the doors were flung open at 6:02pm. (Give whoever was in that marketing meeting a medal) Forget the fact it’s not 3G, forget the fact it costs nearly £300, and forget the fact that I still have 5 months of an Orange contract to see out – I did so very want to merrily join the queue as I strolled past, but my sanity returned, and after putting some distance between me and the Carphone Warehouse’s shiny display stands and sinking into the clammy tube train seat I tried desperately to be at one with the decision I’d made.

I’m going to wait. It won’t be easy, but I can do it…

I’m usually an early adopter, I like having these things early. I still have my first generation iPod which is totally dead but I can’t bring myself to throw it away as I was a member of that exclusive club before it caught on and white headphones were ten-a-penny. (One day will repurpose it but that’s another blog entry) People around me are going to start flashing their iPhones in my face and I’m going to have to grit my teeth and smile sweetly.

Why aren’t I buying an iPhone?

It’s expensive
It’s undoubtedly worth every penny at the point of purchase, but I’ve just maxed out the old credit cards on a trip to New York and Christmas is around the corner. It just wouldn’t be a sensible decision at the moment. The purchase price doesn’t bother me half as much as the ongoing monthly contract though. Bear in mind that usually in the UK we get our phones for free or heavily subsidised through our line rental, but for an iPhone I’d be buying to outright and then paying at least £35 a month for 18 months. That’s actually a total price of £899…

The call plan is rubbish
The minimum O2 call plan is £35 a month for which you get 200 minutes and 200 texts. That’s not really an amazing deal, there are some FAR better price plans out there, but O2 have apparently had to pay so much for the rights to the iPhone, I guess they have to recoup their money somehow. The word is that Apple are also taking a cut of this. Of course, it does include unlimited data, which is actually unlimited since the boss of O2 agreed their ‘fair use’ policy did actuall amount to a limit and was misleading.

It’s not 3G
Wi-Fi is all well and good, but the only reliable hotspot I know of at the moment is in my living room, where I would just use my PowerBook. I imagine 90% of the time I would be using data over O2′s EDGE network which I’ve heard is slow. My experience of using the iPhone in NYC confirmed this. I could put up with this limit if I didn’t know an iPhone v2 is undoubtedly around the corner, so by the second half of 2008 there will be a shiny new razor-sharp, lightning-fast iPhone and Apple will have left me behind again. The thing s: Can I wait until after next summer?

I’m still on Orange!
The biggest reason that I can’t get an iPhone is that I’m lumbered with Orange until April. I’ve been meaning to leave them for years, especially after the truly horriffic experience we had over their appalling broadband service. The thing is, last year they offered me so much stuff in their desperate attempt to retain my custom, that I caved in, and now I’m stuck with them for another 6 months. I could of course buy myself out, but that would cost £120, which makes the iPhone a LOT more costly.

So…

I’m not getting one, I’ll have to watch others prodding away at theirs, but I’m going to wait. By April I’m hoping the rumour-mill will give me something in the way of an iPhone v2 to focus on and after I’ve got one of those I can pat myself on the back for my good judgement. Of course, as the iPhone isn’t subsidised by the contract, in theory there wouldn’t be anything stopping me getting an one, then upgrading to the next version when it comes out and selling my original one. If O2 will allow this, (and they ought to) it might see me owning an iPhone sooner rather than later…