In the meantime, remember these things:
1) We do not pull data from your contact list before notifying you. There is now a notification in-game when this is done. And it is only done on the community page by YOU pressing the submit button.
2) We never store your contact list on our web server.
3) All data sent over the wire is now completely encrypted.
4) No contact data is saved on your phone's hard drive anymore. This has been removed.

Sounds good to us. [Aurora Feint]

• Remote: Control your iTunes or Apple TV over the network from anywhere inside your house. I've got a great setup for this that basically broadcasts music to every room of my home, which I will detail in a review next week.

• AIM: It's no iChat and it's not multi-service capable, but it is AIM and it does exactly what you think it does. We covered its shortcomings in the App Marathon, it's still quite a good product.

• Pageonce: The personal assistant that keeps all your online accounts synced to one place for easy reference.

• Twinkle: The Twitter app that we loved on Installer.app makes its way to the iPhone. Why do we like Twitter? Because we're Twitter Shitters.

• Facebook: It's like regular Facebook, but with less functionality! It's fast though, and you can see what that guy who randomly added you is up to.

• Fulpower Motionx-Poker: The realistic dice game gives you something to do when you really, really need to shake things.

• Yelp: Its current location-based search helped us find some good eats when we were down in LA for E3, and should be a good go-to tool if you're visiting a new city.

• Midomi: The free song recognition app can tell you what tune that is on the radio or blaring out of the speakers down at A&F. Beats having to call in to ask.

• Pandora: It's Pandora (the smart radio station) on the iPhone. Makes up for only having 16GB of your music at once.

• NYTimes: Read the NYTimes from the comfort of your iPhone, because Safari isn't quite good enough.

• EverNote: The note-taking app that makes it super easy to jot down or record random thoughts you want to remember later.

• Zenbe: A to-do list that you can sync to a webapp online or share with others. Great way to make collaborative shopping lists that both you and your wife can check off while in the supermarket. Divide and conquer makes grocery time twice as fast.

• MooCowMusic Band: You can fake play instruments.

• CityTransit: A guide to the NYC subway. Obviously, only useful for some of us.

• UrbanSpoon: Its like Yelp, but has a random slot-machine feature that can pick a restaurant for you to eat at. Pretty neat if you want to vary up your dining experience.

• BoxOffice: Look up show times for movies in theaters that are within X distance of your current location.

Two caveats to this. One, you shouldn't interrupt a backup that's in place, because that results in a corrupt backup. It's fine if you perform another backup right after to make a correct one, but if you forget and try and restore? It's phone corruption time. Two, using this method means you will not have a phone backup. Yeah, seriously. You won't have anything to restore from, so you'll have to go in naked the next time something's broken with your OS. Now that you know what the risks are, here's how you do it:

This command will change a hidden setting in the iTunes preferences that will force it to skip the backup process.

1. - Quit iTunes.
2. - Open Terminal.app
3. - Copy and paste this in, then hit return:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true

4. - Open iTunes
5. - Plug in your iPhone (2.0 or 3G) and sync.

It will take a few seconds, assuming you don't have a ton of music or podcasts.

Changing the 'true' in step 3 to 'false' will re-enable the backup feature.

[Zerologic]

The car was designed by one of the professional print, web, and environmental designers attending a derby for charity put on by the Columbus Society of Communication Professionals—so it is not a true Pinewood Derby car. To be honest, I don't think that this would even pass strict Boy Scout regulations. Nonetheless, it is a damn fine looking car and it appears to be up to date with 2.0 software. Unfortunately, we don't know if this thing is truly state-of-the-art with 3G horsepower under the hood. [Flickr and CSArts via Make]

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All the phones are going to the direct fulfillment program, so don't expect to just walk into a store and buy one. They're not getting them, and won't, until the shortage is over:

We hope to begin re-stocking our stores as soon as we can, but first priority goes to those customers who purchased through direct fulfillment.

Our advice? If you've gotta have one NOW, take Friday off, drive to an Apple Store before it opens, and make an urban camping trip out of it—bring beef jerky, a fishing pole (to fend off panhandlers) and guitar to sing Kumbaya, which, with any luck, will drive people out of line. [AT&T]

I use the iPhone myself. I know that it's an attractive product, but when I look carefully at the iPhone's users vs. the users of our Nintendo DS, I understand there are some overlaps. And if you ask 'Is the overlap too big?,' my answer is no, not so much.

Iwata's argument may be true, but the real reason that Apple can't touch the DS market is that Nintendo has sold like a bajillion of the things already. Oh yeah, and the iPhone still has some control issues... [Forbes via DSFanboy]

According to their site, WinPwn 2.0.0.1 has the following features:

- Support for both 1.1.4 and 2.0

- Custom Image Support

- Custom Payload Support

- 3g iPhone support

[WinPwn and Rapidshare Mirror]

The framework is expected to roll in the fall. As TechCrunch points out, Facebook's iPhone SDK indicates that mobile is a big part of their vision—so expect to see a lot more Facebook on your phone (and other gear) in the near future. Hope you're into oversharing! [TechCrunch]

According to their forums, if you opt-in to the community feature, Aurora Feint looks through your contact list, sends it unencrypted to their servers, and matches you up with your friends who are currently playing right now. Great feature, for sure, but that whole looking through our contact list and sending it in plain text to your server is cause for us to go OMGWTFBBQ.

When we discovered that the Apple SDK allowed us to look through your contact list we thought it would be a great idea to automatically show you which friends are playing the game. Why automatically? Well, everyone always complains about the keyboard on the iPhone and how annoying it is to type on it. So we thought, "Hey, why don't we make this feature REALLY easy to use – no typing!" And such, the community feature was born. Some people have said that it would have been ok if we had a better notice explaining what was going on. I agree! We weren't trying to be sneaky about how this worked. It was just overlooked. No one we showed it to even asked a question about it – nor did we. It just simply never came up as a potential issue when we beta tested the game with early users.

Upside is, if you didn't use the community feature, you're OK.

In the 1.0 version of the game we just didn't get around to doing everything we wanted to do in time for the launch: remember we tried to do a high quality game in 10 weeks flat. So, if you opt-in to the community feature, when you refresh your friends, the data is sent unencrypted to our web servers. Before you freak out though, let me explain why this was done. We just thought that it was a cool feature and that we'd implement security stuff if we became popular. To that end, the web server we launched with was a teeny box with almost no power. We spent the first few days scrambling to scale our servers. We really had no idea how popular we were going to be. We added this feature in near the end of our development cycle and simply decided that we didn't have enough time to spend to make it secure in advance of knowing if it was even going to be a hit.

Good intentions by slightly amateur programmers. It's alright. No malice intended. They're actually asking the community as to how they should proceed, and you should go tell them.

It's also a credit to Apple for finding out the mistake and shutting it down. Even though the line about having all apps be vetted through the store in the first place was to make sure all of them are safe, some stuff like this still slipped through because it's pretty much unfeasible to test each application to make sure they're not sending out your private data. Apps and app updates are already delayed for a week or more because Apple's checking them out. [Thanks mjborch1]

Unmentioned in Laptop's piece is that the Skyfire browser actually shows you a page that has been pre-crunched by Skyfire's servers, so it's essentially showing you an image. And yeah, since the browser itself isn't doing any heavy lifting, it's going to fly. But stuff like text entry is annoying, since you have to input text, send that back to Skyfire, and then it comes back to you. Flash works the same way, but hey, at least it does flash. We're not really sure what's up with Opera Mobile 9.5 taking twice as long as Safari to render a page, but maybe that's 'cause it's big boned feature packed. [Laptop Mag]

Enter in your logins to your Wells Fargos, your Netflixes, your Comcasts and your Diggs once and you'll be able to check them out on the go. Wondering whether that check cleared? Just tap your bank's name and it'll come up with your account info. Want to know when that movie is due from Blockbuster Online? When your next utility payment is due? Easy.

The only thing we'd potentially worry about is having all your logins and passwords held by one institution, reducing each company's security systems to a single point-of-fault held by Pageonce. On the one hand, the service is supposedly pretty safe and has stuff like 256-bit authentication, and on the other hand, we're too lazy to individually visit each web page when we want to look up stuff. This seems like a win-win. Except when you lose your phone, then it's a mad dash to delete your info from Pageonce. [Pageonce]

"There is a huge shortage of iPhone developers. Good thing there are books and classes to get new ones up to speed. Oh right: FUCKING NDA." More seriously, he points out that the NDA, unless lifted, threatens dev conferences like iPhoneDevCamp 2, where they'd get together to obviously talk about programming. The apps are out there, it's silly they still can't they talk about creating them. [Fucking NDA via TUAW]

AT&T is not currently planning to use this tech to manipulate current iPhone apps (Contacts? Maps? Mail?) but instead will deploy it in web services for a number of net-enabled handsets. This is a somewhat curious choice for AT&T, but it would be difficult to implement system-wide speech recognition without either modifying existing apps or running a (currently disallowed) background service to catch commands. Speech Mashups will be an interesting service for the other handsets it shows up on, but they already have simple voice commands. By building secondary voice capabilities like this for a phone without basic ones, AT&T has inadvertently highlighted one of Apple's most irritating restrictions on iPhone development. [Gadget Lab]

Developers can’t touch or enhance iTunes or iPod functionality in any way, shape or form—they can’t even access your music directory, meaning you better like the way the iPod button works just the way it is. Don't expect any apps to use your wonderfully curated music library either.
Casualties: Instinctiv Shuffle, a smart shuffle application that learns your skipping behavior to figure what you actually wanna hear next. Tap Tap Revolution became the watered-down Tap Tap Revenge.

No processes can run in the background—apps have to completely quit when exited, completely contained in their little sandbox.
Casualties: IM is a popular example, but Apple’s upcoming push notifications will probably make them a moot rallying point. It also means that third-party copy-and-paste solutions won’t work, since you can’t move the text to another application. Also impossible is a fantasy app of ours, TrippWire, that would record phone conversations (all legal considerations aside).

Devs can't integrate apps or functions into the OS. Third-party apps will always be second-class citizens, and can't significantly alter iPhone functions, including accessing the calendar or SMS messaging or adding any content to the otherwise useless lock screen that appears when you wake up the phone.
Casualites: Intelliborn’s Mario Ciabarra lamented to us that the SDK actually doesn’t give you all the same APIs and tools as Apple, and is missing a whole bunch of critical ones that’d let you add content to the lock screen, access calendar events or mail, or change the way the iPhone responds to events, meaning there’s no way for him to build his app Intelliscreen (above) using the SDK. Instinctiv CEO Justin Smithline also told us that you simply "can't create a well-integrated app," like Instinctiv Shuffle. This set of restrictions "flies in the face" of Apple's own philosophy of the creating beautiful software with the best possible user experience, says Smithline.

Pirated games, movies or whatever are a no-no in the App Store, obviously.
Casualties: NES.app, or any emulator, really, dooming us to bloated, over-priced renditions of Tetris by videogame mega-publishers. Also off limits, a dedicated video streaming app for something like the old Stage6 or QuickSilverScreen, which traffics in content that’s, um, not legally spotless, to say the least.

A bit different than the piracy concern, apps using copyrights, trademarks or intellectual property of a major company are sticky, and the App Store will steer clear of them if they're not developed by the company itself.
Casualties: Apps like TiVoRemote would have to be developed by TiVo or else they'd have dicey prospects, at best. Basically anything involving a company’s intellectual property or trademarks from anyone but the company themselves. An app that'll stream movies from your Netflix "Watch Instantly" account by anybody but Netflix would be another obvious foul.

Devs don't have deep access to the hardware. Jonathan Zdziarski, creator of NES.app and author of a few iPhone books, told us "much of the lower-level functionality has been hidden" in the SDK so "if your application is going to meet the necessarily political requirements, these more powerful features are off-limits."
Casualties: Stuff like Camera Pro, which gives you a ridiculous amount of control over the camera, would have a hard time complying with SDK rules. More than that, Zdziarski says, Apple has "privatized" the CoreSurface framework, which is "making it very difficult for developers to write their own movie players, 2D games, and similar kinds of renderings," especially with performance approaching passable.

Apple's app review process is a complete mystery to developers and takes forever, which can affect app quality and horribly delays app updates.
Casualties: Aurora Feint's developers revealed to us, "How the whole review process [for applications] goes is unknown to us," and that Apple doesn't even tell developers how many times their app is downloaded—they’ve gotta figure it out by the size of the check or have the app report back. NetNewsWire's Brent Simmons related the cloak-and-dagger headaches to Wired, telling them that developers are "not supposed to discuss actually programming on the iPhone with anybody—even though that would raise the quality of the apps." Between July 11 and July 17, Simmons pumped out five updates to its application and none of them had showed up by the 17th.

Apple limits app testing to five devices, so there is basically is no beta testing.
Casualties: Us. We’re the beta testers. Aurora Feint’s developers told us that for app testing, “Apple requires special signing to be done that binds each app to a specific device for debugging purposes,” and it’s limited to five, so they "definitely had some people camping out in our offices" to test. Twitterific creator Craig Hockenberry notes that the iPhone app's crash report come to a dev in a form barely more comprehensible than Swahili, on top of lacking info about what's going on in the phone outside their app. And then, if you do have a fix, there's no way to test it, other than to release it out into the wild through the App Store, "the developer equivalent of playing Russian roulette."

On the upside, Apple appears to be launching a beta testing program soon that'll let devs test apps on up to 100 devices, which jibes with what Tapulous CEO Bart Decrem alluded to in a conversation with us. Hopefully it does roll out in the next couple days, as expected. But even then, putting beta software on a device will require the iPhone or iPod serial number, and will still have to snagged through the App Store.

Apple's number one priority is Apple.
Casualties: Basically anything that threatens any of the iPhone’s core functions or key profit centers. Opera told us they aren't developing for the iPhone because the SDK doesn't allow apps "that interpret code, which is essentially what the browser does." Mozilla CEO John Lilly is more acidic in this month’s Wired saying, “Apple makes it too hard” but they’re using “a business argument masquerading as a technological” one. Any formats not supported by Apple essentially don’t exist. AT&T has implied to us that it’s Apple that’s not allowing laptop tethering, though there’s obviously network considerations for the carrier, so we're reasonably, but not totally, sure. The NY Times makes it clear that distributors of free music or video will have it tough too, so don’t expect a MyWaves or a Hulu app until the rules get clearer. Steve Jobs told the NYT that this does represent a competitive threat. "We will compete” with developers’ apps, he said blatantly.

As anyone running the 2.0 software knows, there are definite stability issues, lending a lot of credence to Apple's sandbox for applications—could you imagine it being more unstable? On the other hand, the massive anticipation for the Pwnage 2.0 tool, the vast universe of applications we’re missing out on—not just pirated goodies, but honest-to-God mission-critical wares—shows the SDK clearly doesn't provide everything we need it to. And it might never. But the black market app economy can and does fill the void. Apple might seek to shut it down, but the iPhone's two-class app economy may prove to be its greatest strength.

If you've played Super Monkey Ball, you know that the EA folks are right when they told us the iPhone devs still have a ways to go before they can tease statistically accurate data out of the acceleromters for precision control of a game. The same problem unfortunately applies to A-Level. Right now, every reasonably level surface in my house is registering around -2 degrees off-center when a measurement is taken in landscape mode. When you tilt the phone straight up to measure with the bottom, the orientation of the accelerometers shifts, and the inaccuracies EA was talking about become apparent as it swings to the opposite side of the spectrum—around +6 degrees off-center.

A simple re-zero button will help this app immensely—allowing you to take quick comparative readings that aren't as susceptible to error. The developer, Posimotion, says this is on the way—but until then, hold on to your old, non-virtual level.

UPDATE: As many of you have noticed, one of the iPhone SDK demo apps is a similar moving-bubble level. While that doesn't preclude someone from releasing what is in itself a potentially useful app (I just used it tonight while moving some furniture around, actually), charging the 99 cents is indeed a little galling.

[iTunes Store via Gadget Lab; Giz's iPhone App Review Marathon]

The Price: $21.90

The Verdict: Protective goodness. We're usually very down on cases for any kind of phone or PMP—why cover up something well designed with something quite ugly—but sleeves are an entirely different matter. Fabrix' version provides ample cushioning for your phone when it's not in use, but you're supposed to take your iPhone entirely out of the sleeve when you're actually handling it. Couple that with the fact that these sleeves are actually very nice looking and you've got a great combination of usability and aesthetics.

It's especially useful for women with purses, as the ones we're familiar with just throw their phones in with their keys, pens and other sharp objects. Now with the case, we can place our phones in the same pocket as our keys—something we have always stayed away from. Pick up a few to change out when you're tired of the old one. [Fabrix]

It's running slowly, but once Apple releases a video [API for the iPhone] SDK, performance should get to 20-30 frames/second. We've all seen the awesome 3D games that can run on the iPhone, so fast AR applications will also be possible in the future, with all that multi-touch goodness thrown in as well.

Looking at the demo, and knowing the amount of coding it took for the video alone, it may slow but it feels very promising. [Artoolworks — Thanks Mark]

Qik video is streamed to a personalized Qik page, and can be pushed to other places, such as Facebook apps. Latency is as short as .5 seconds or as long a 3 seconds, and the service can now stream privately to select groups. Qik says they're intent is not to be a destination page, but be a conduit for content to appear places like personal blogs and Facebook. [Venture Beat via Electronista]

Apple Reports Record Third Quarter Results
Revenue Up 38 Percent Year-Over-Year
Mac Sales Reach All-Time High

CUPERTINO, California—July 21, 2008—Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2008 third quarter ended June 28, 2008. The Company posted revenue of $7.46 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.07 billion, or $1.19 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $5.41 billion and net quarterly profit of $818 million, or $.92 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 34.8 percent, down from 36.9 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 42 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

Apple shipped 2,496,000 Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing 41 percent unit growth and 43 percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 11,011,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 12 percent unit growth and seven percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone™ units sold were 717,000 compared to 270,000 in the year-ago-quarter.

“We’re proud to report the best June quarter for both revenue and earnings in Apple’s history,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We set a new record for Mac sales, we think we have a real winner with our new iPhone 3G, and we’re busy finishing several more wonderful new products to launch in the coming months.”

“We’re extremely pleased with the growth of our business and the generation of almost $5.4 billion in cash in the first three quarters of fiscal 2008,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “Looking ahead to the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008, we expect revenue of about $7.8 billion and earnings per diluted share of about $1.00.”

Apple will provide live streaming of its Q3 2008 financial results conference call utilizing QuickTime®, Apple’s standards-based technology for live and on-demand audio and video streaming. The live webcast will begin at 2:00 p.m. PDT on Monday, July 21, 2008 at www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/earningsQ308/ and will also be available for replay.

This press release contains forward-looking statements including without limitation those about the Company’s estimated revenue and earnings per share. These statements involve risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ. Risks and uncertainties include without limitation potential litigation from the matters investigated by the special committee of the board of directors and the restatement of the Company’s consolidated financial statements; unfavorable results of other legal proceedings; the effect of competitive and economic factors, and the Company’s reaction to those factors, on consumer and business buying decisions with respect to the Company’s products; war, terrorism, public health issues, and other circumstances that could disrupt supply, delivery, or demand of products; continued competitive pressures in the marketplace; the Company’s reliance on sole service providers for iPhone in certain countries; the continued availability on acceptable terms of certain components and services essential to the Company’s business currently obtained by the Company from sole or limited sources; the ability of the Company to deliver to the marketplace and stimulate customer demand for new programs, products, and technological innovations on a timely basis; the effect that product transitions, changes in product pricing or mix, and/or increases in component costs could have on the Company’s gross margin; the effect that product quality problems could have on the Company’s sales and operating profits; the inventory risk associated with the Company’s need to order or commit to order product components in advance of customer orders; the effect that the Company’s dependency on manufacturing and logistics services provided by third parties may have on the quality, quantity or cost of products manufactured or services rendered; the Company’s dependency on the performance of distributors and other resellers of the Company’s products; the Company’s reliance on the availability of third-party digital content; and the potential impact of a finding that the Company has infringed on the intellectual property rights of others. More information on potential factors that could affect the Company’s financial results is included from time to time in the Company’s public reports filed with the SEC, including the Company’s Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 29, 2007; its Forms 10-Q for the quarters ended December 29, 2007 and March 29, 2008; and its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 28, 2008, to be filed with the SEC. The Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

[Apple]

Of course, your original iPhone might not fit so harmoniously after this mod. [Hard Mac via Engadget]

According to Hayahi, the problem of up-skirt photography is so bad in Japan that most new cellphones have this feature (if you are a women) or bug (if you are a perv.) According to him, "some manufacturers have even put a louder shutter sound." The Japanese edition of the iPhone, however, just makes the normal one.

I really don't see the point of this measure however: the iPhone doesn't have a physical photo button, which really makes extremely difficult to take a clear up-skirt shot.

I mean, I can only guess that's the case.

Two things to Japanese pervs everywhere: fiber optics and video cameras.

Update: as readers have noticed, you can use Pwnage to jailbreak your iPhone and remove the sound. Why would you want to do this, I don't know.

- It auto-finds the bl39 and bl46 files better, if they’re on your computer.
- It creates the ~/Library/iTunes/Device Support/ folder if not present, which should help with some 1600 errors people have been having.
- Many people have reported the PwnageTool not starting up at all (the icon never stops bouncing). This issue should be resolved now.
- The Sparkle AppCast URL is fixed in this version, so automatic updates should work for future releases.

If you successfully jailbroke and unlocked your iPhone with OS 2.0 with the previous one, there's no need for you to use this version. Otherwise, you can download from here or here.