New iPhone App: Bands streaming theirs songs directly to you

If you're a Presidents of the United States of America fan, you can now listen to the band's entire discography for a mere $3, but not through the iTunes Store. Fire up your iPhone and grab it from the App Store instead; the band has bypassed the record label bureaucracy and released everything on its own.

What's a good way to release your entire back catalog of music to a large audience without having to deal with the bureaucratic red tape of the record labels and the iTunes Store? Release it yourself through the App Store, of course. The album-as-an-iPhone-app method has been experimented with by some bands already, but the Presidents of the United States of America (yes, the guys behind the "Peaches" song) have gone all out, selling its entire discography through the App Store in hopes of engaging fans in ways they couldn't through the iTunes Store alone.

The app, called "The Presidents' Music - PUSA," sells for $2.99 on the App Store (iTunes link) offers users access to four full albums, including the band's early "lost" recordings. This includes the previously-unavailable FroggyStyle—"unless you have one of the 500 cassettes the band sold in 1994, you've never heard this before," reads the app description. The app also features a number of extras and exclusives that the band says are updated regularly, and fans can read the band's blog directly from the app on their iPhones or iPod touches.

Continue reading @ ARS Technica

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Free iPhone Jailbreak banned - latest iPhone developer agreement

The "iPhone Developer Program License Agreement" governs what iPhone developers can and cannot do. Now, jailbreaking, assisting in jailbreaking, and developing and distributing jailbreak apps are among the things that the latest revision of that agreement does not condone.

Of course, Apple forbids the creation of apps that violate privacy, facilitate crimes, or violate intellectual property laws. But registered developers can no longer jailbreak their own phones or assist others in jailbreaking their phones, including (but not limited to) working on projects such as QuickPwn or PwnageTool. Developers are also forbidden from using the iPhone OS, SDK, or other developer tools to develop applications for distribution in any way other than the App Store or Ad Hoc distribution—which of course rules out distribution via Cydia, free or otherwise.

The relevant clauses in the agreement, a copy of which was made available to Ars, are as follows:

(e)You will not, through use of the Apple Software, services or otherwise, create any Application or other program that would disable, hack or otherwise interfere with the Security Solution, or any security, digital signing, digital rights management, verification or authentication mechanisms implemented in or by the iPhone operating system software, iPod touch operating system software, this Apple Software, any services or other Apple software or technology, or enable others to do so; and

(f) Applications developed using the Apple Software may only be distributed if selected by Apple (in its sole discretion) for distribution via the App Store or for limited distribution on Registered Devices (ad hoc distribution) as contemplated in this Agreement.

Though jailbreaking allows access to apps that Apple doesn't approve of and enables unlocking the phone from approved carriers, it also allows users and developers access to the UNIX underpinnings of iPhone OS, which both groups could have perfectly legitimate reasons for wanting.

Read the whole article @ ARS Technica

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AT&T confirms contract-free iPhone 3G

After a nine-month wait, AT&T says that it will definitely offer iPhones without a contract, according to a spokesperson for the company. They're still locked to AT&T, but at least you won't have to commit to two years of AT&T punishment love-ins.

Earlier today, we told you about unconfirmed evidence that AT&T planned to offer iPhones without a contract. AT&T spokesperson Michael Coe has now confirmed in a statement to the AP that "no-commit" iPhones will go on sale next Thursday, March 26.

As rumored, the 8GB iPhone 3G will sell for $599 and the 16GB iPhone 3G will sell for $699. So now you know: AT&T is subsidizing $400 of the cost of the iPhone if you're willing to commit to two years of service.

AT&T said it would probably offer a contract-free option for the iPhone after the initial July launch frenzy settled down. That was nine months ago, for those of you keeping score. Further, the "no-commit" option is limited to one per customer per active line, and they are still locked to AT&T. Still, for those who don't want to be saddled with two years of service, you now have another option.

Read the whole article @ ARS Technica

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Rumored iPhone OS 3.0 copy and paste explained

Copy and paste—one of the iPhone's most-requested features—may finally arrive with Apple's media sneak peek of iPhone OS 3.0 tomorrow, according to social news king Kevin Rose. He even claims to have a basic explanation of how the feature will work, but Rose leaves out some crucial details.

Founder of social news site Digg and random Apple rumor courier Kevin Rose claims to have a handful of details on what Apple will announce in its iPhone OS 3.0 unveiling tomorrow. Among Rose's mentionable tidbits is that copy and paste should finally arrive, and he even offered a believable explanation, a clip of which is embedded below, of how the feature will work.

Rose explains that, in iPhone OS 3.0, double-tapping a word will display a magnifying-glass-like icon that contains two draggable quotation marks. Drag the marks around the word or chunk of text you want to copy, and a contextual menu will appear, offering options to copy or paste. This sounds fairly plausible, and at least as good of a UI implementation as any of the previous mockups of how this feature could work. It is worth noting that Rose has a pretty good Apple rumor track record, nailing some announcements like the 4G iPod nano, the original iPhone, and iTunes 8. The full Diggnation episode (number 194), recorded live at SXSW this past weekend, is not yet up on the Revision3 Diggnation site. You will have to deal with the brief clips for now. Unfortunately, Rose does not get into specifics of just how far this copy and paste functionality will reach.

Read the whole article @ ARS Technica

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ColorSplash for iPhone creates eye-catching photo effects

Ars celebrates Holi by taking a peek at ColorSplash, a new iPhone application that lets you create splashes of colors in otherwise desaturated photographs. The app is fun, but let's just say your finger isn't the most precise photo editing tool.

I decided to take a look at ColorSplash, a new iPhone photo editing utility, in honor of Holi, the Spring festival of colors. ColorSplash works by desaturating images and letting you restore just parts of the colors by drawing them in with your finger. As the image shown here demonstrates, this can be extremely effective visually, allowing one part of the image to pop.

Unfortunately, this is a little easier said than done with ColorSplash, despite a good application suite. The iPhone and your finger just aren't the best tools for the kind of precision work that proper colorizing demands. I'm not saying that the program wasn't fun to work with—it was—but my results, even with careful application, came nowhere near the quality of the demo images, such as this man with the umbrella.

ColorSplash has a number of UI issues. The buttons at the top of the screen are just a little too hard to tap and just a bit too close together, because there are six of them. From left to right, they offer a main menu, a help file, a two-choice toggle between showing color or showing a Photoshop-style mask, a drawing-tool thickness pop-up, and an undo button. These are all very good options, but I would have skipped the help button, offering it in the pop-down menu instead, and chosen some other approach for the color/mask overlay choice.

Read the whole article @ ARS Technica

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Simplify free iPhone login at AT&T hotspots

If you're willing to spend $1.99, you can simplify accessing free WiFi from your iPhone at AT&T hotspots. Devicescape's Easy WiFi software for iPhone has been updated to include a zero-data-entry bypass that's perfectly legitimate.

Devicescape has you create an account on its Web site to manage hotspot settings, whether for free or fee networks. Its client software for iPhone, Mac OS X, Windows, Symbian, and other platforms, syncs some information or retrieves it on the fly using a clever tunneling technique.

To add iPhone access, sign up for a free Devicescape account, select "AT&T Wi-Fi (iPhone)" from the list of hotspots, and enter your iPhone's 10-digit phone number. The client software takes care of all the rest. If you already have Easy WiFi installed, you can enter the details via the iPhone app.

You can let Devicescape do the typing for you to use AT&T's free iPhone hotspot access.

Read the whole article @ ARS Technica

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iPhone to get the classic adventure game Myst

How to ruin a great game: Myst for Nintendo DS

Is there anyone who doesn't remember the date, time, place, and state of undress when they saw their first pornographic image? For me, it was the early morning of Christmas, 1993, boxers only, staring in open-eyed wonder at Myst. The greatest adventure game ever made redefined the genre of adventure games. Myst made the CD-ROM famous for gaming and held the title of best-selling PC game until The Sims came along at the turn of the millennium. Now, iMyst is coming, this time for the greatest phone/media player/casual gaming device ever made.

Read the whole article @ Ars Technica

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"iPhone Elite" team posts free iPhone unbricking instructions

Something we haven't really covered much here on Infinite Loop is the recent drama going down within the prolific iPhone Dev Team (the team of hackers chopping away at the iPhone's software, not the iPhone team within Apple). Not long after the 1.1.1 iPhone firmware came down, conflicts that may have otherwise sat dormant arose within the group over how to handle future hacking efforts. A smaller group broke off from the main team and formed the "iPhone Elite" team, which staunchly disagrees with some of the directives of the greater iPhone Dev Team. Then iPhone Elite egged the iPhone Dev Team's house, wrote nasty things about them on the bathroom wall, and pulled their hair.

Drama aside, one of the things that the iPhone Elite team disagreed with was how the iPhone Dev Team was handling (or not handling, as the case may be) the unbricking/relocking procedure that it had promised and haven't quite followed through on. Apparently tired of waiting, the iPhone Elite team has now posted its own instructions on how to downgrade the baseband firmware on the iPhone, so that those who had previously unlocked their iPhones can upgrade to 1.1.1 without worrying about bricking.

Read the whole article @ ARS Technica

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Stream your iTunes library to your iPhone and iPod touch

Whether the size of your iTunes library outpaces your iPhone or iPod touch by a song or a mile, you've had to develop some kind of system for picking exactly which media you bring on the go. Sure, smart playlists can swap out a fresh collection of tunes and videos each time you sync, but what if you could stream your entire library and do away with having to chose altogether?

If you can hop on a WiFi hotspot either in the home or wandering elsewhere, the Embraceware Blog has a handy tip for those who just gotta have all their media at the touch of a finger. Setup isn't exactly a one-click operation, but after enabling Mac OS X's built-in Personal Web Sharing feature and performing some Terminal trickery, you'll be able to use MobileSafari and WiFi on your iPhone and iPod touch to browse your entire library and stream anything you want.

Read the whole article @ ARS Technica

Get a Free iPhone! Yes, that is correct! Stay away from the hassles of waiting in long lineups for you can get it the simple way .... straight to your doorstep! Free! Interested? Then find out how to get a Free iPhone!

GUI version of free iPhone unlock in the works

For anyone who was waiting for a free unlock before they purchased an iPhone, yesterday's announcement of iUnlock was great news. Now that the unlock has been released, iPhone hackers are engaging in one of their favorite pursuits: making existing hacks even easier to use. The unlocking process with iUnlock isn't particularly complex, but TUAW's Erica Sadun is working on an even simpler, GUI-based iPhone unlocking tool, which should be released in the next few days.

As it turns out, there's already a GUI unlock application out there, but it's got quite a bit of drama surrounding it. The original iUnlock tool was written by the iPhone Dev Team, with the upcoming graphical additions courtesy of Erica. Unfortunately, that hasn't stopped a UK man from ripping off the code for the GUI unlock and releasing it as his own, as well as trying to take credit for the original free unlock. The whole story is a bit complex, but suffice to say that the current GUI unlock tool is based on some code ripped from other developers, and is being distributed without their consent, making it more than a bit sketchy.

The version of the application that has been released is a pretty crude beta, whereas the product from Erica and the iPhone Dev Team promises to be far more polished. The software will offer a one-click unlock of the iPhone, using the method detailed in the iUnlock instructions. Even if you hate the command line and are desperate for an easier way to unlock your iPhone, I'd highly recommend waiting for the release of the official GUI unlock. It should be available fairly soon, and will even be available through Installer.app to make things even easier. People have put a lot of time and effort into developing cool hacks for the iPhone, so I think it's worth waiting a few days in order to show them some appreciation and support.

Article @ Ars Technica

Get a Free iPhone! Yes, that is correct! Stay away from the hassles of waiting in long lineups for you can get it the simple way .... straight to your doorstep! Free! Interested? Then find out how to get a Free iPhone!