Psystar i7 Intel Quad Core

troubleshooting tip

Warning: We haven't tested this because we're playing with fireworks. [Make It Rain via BBG]

Right, so bear with me here: this week our apps are all about learning new things, understanding the world around you, meeting new people, playing extremely silly games in large groups. Sort of like being a kid again! No? Ok.

Pocket Universe: It's a pinchy, zoomy, 3D star map for the iPhone and iPod Touch. For the iPhone 3GS, for which the new Pocket Universe is designed, you get full-on astronomical augmented reality. Using location services, accelerometer data and the 3GS's compass, Pocket Universe pseudo-overlays information about your stars, planets, constellations and general space things according to whatever you're pointing at. Three dollars.

Loopt for iPod Touch: The Loopt iPhone app has been around as long as, well, iPhone apps. Since 2008, it's earned its keep as one of the only useful friend-locating apps. Just about every mobile platform has a client, with one notable exception: the iPod Touch. That, along with Of course, Loopt isn't quite the same without GPS, but Wi-Fi location will get you by in a bind. Still waiting for a proper 3.0 version though. Free.

Seek 'n Spell: iPhone games tend to be a lot like games for any other portable device, and rarely leverage some of the traditionally non-gaming capabilities of the handset. Part of this is because, until recently, the developer SDK was sort of limited. Most of it, I think, is because developers just haven't been thinking hard enough.

Take this clever, if obvious, idea for a game: A map of wherever you are is overlaid with letters, which you and you teammates can collect by physically running to their icons. Your goal is to come up with words for points, Scrabble-style. It's a very, very cool idea, and decidedly sweatier than your typical iPhone game. A buck.

MSNBC: Hey, look, another news organization has a content app! Let's talk about it! This one's less about news than about catering to fans of the network, with an emphasis on video content as well as Twitter feeds from MSNBC personalities. It's a bit hard on the eyes, and occasionally goes stuttery on you, but it works fine. Fun fact: according to the iTunes description, this iPhone app, being an MSNBC product, uses "Microsoft's Advanced Technologies." What this means, I have no idea. Free.

Fluent News: If you could sense a lack of excitement about that MSNBC app, that was because of apps like Fluent. It's far from the first multi-source news aggregator, but it's one of the better ones. It behave like Google News, more or less, collecting important news from lots of sources and grouping it in a sensible way Why not just use Google News then, you might rudely interject? Well, for one, Fluent can cache news for offline reading, for plans, subways, caves, or wherever. It also prefetches longer articles, though I couldn't really tell in my brief testing. Anyway, it's free, so why not?

Skype: Another incremental update to another extremely popular app. This one gets an interface lift, but most importantly, two useful features for people who use Skype's pay services: text messaging with SkypeOut credit (good for cheap international texts; bad for having no reply function), and Skype Voicemail support. Voicemail support is a bigger deal than it sounds: since receiving calls when you're out is still pretty much out of the question, the voicemail access makes being out of touch a little less irritating. Still free.

Air Sharing Pro: We've always been impressed with Air Sharing—it's a solid file storage/viewing solution in its basic form. The Pro version, though, is a different animal entirely. First of all, it's expensive: $10, to be exact. It's also got expanded support for file storage services like, MobileMe, MyDisk, and Drop.io.

The main draw is that there are tons of new file functions: emailing, which is a huge help; direct printing, via OS X printer sharing; archiving abilities, including viewing archive contents without extracting. It's a bit like a walled-in version of Finder, and the closest to a proper file browser you're going to get on a non-jailbroken iPhone.

This Week's App News on Giz:

• Facebook 3.0 for iPhone Adds Events and Photo Albums, But No Push (Yet)

• Apple's Nudie App Headaches Now Involve Underage Girls

• iPhone OS 3.1 Features: Better Video Editing, Voice Control Over Bluetooth, And More

• Remarkable Speech-to-Speech Voice Translator Coming to iPhone and Blackberry

• Birdfeed Twitter App Review: Lean, Fast and Pretty

• Doom Resurrection for iPhone Hits the App Store, Costs $10

• A Whole Lotta Quake Will Be Blowing Up Your iPhone

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory and our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a good weekend everybody.

A 26-year-old employee was shot today during a "violent armed robbery" of the Clarendon Apple Store in Arlington, Virginia. Video news report embedded below—details at Cult of Mac. [Cult of Mac via BBG]

RunPee, that great website that tells you precisely the best time to run and pee during a movie so you don't miss anything good, has taken the next step and released an iPhone app for quick reference.

The RunPee app features a countdown that lists all of the most opportune times to dash away, and like the site, it'll tell you what happened during your pee break. We're a little bit iffy on people constantly whipping out their iPhones to check anything during a movie, but hopefully this won't lead to any extra film-watching rudeness. The app is available now (link will open iTunes) for $1. [Mashable via Lifehacker]

Owners of the iPhone or iPod touch in the U.K. will be able to use their phone to both buy and pay for goods using a new application from MoBank.

Cult of Mac reports on a "sketch-looking" non functional white iPhone that is being sold on eBay as a prototype iPhone 3GS.

The seller says there’s a problem with restoring the software: “This device is not eligible for the re...

The first jailbreaking application for the iPhone 3GS -- purplera1n -- is now available.

Staff Pick: atMonitor atMonitor is a all in one view of the state of your system. Once installed, it runs and collects data and statistics about your system, displaying them in colorful and customizable graphs that will display in floating windows or in the menubar. You can set up triggers for threshold values, so you can execute scripts or perform other functions when the system surpasses a detected level for any measurement.

Security researcher Charlie Miller has discovered a way to attack and control an iPhone using only SMS messages. Don't worry, the details aren't public yet, and Apple should have a patch soon.

 

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Collins America has announced its new portable amplifier system, the BagAmp. The composite enclosure vertical line array self-amplified system uses eight Audio Piston loudspeakers. Priced at US$699, the new BagAmp line array PA system will be displayed at the upcoming NAMM Summer Show, July 17-19, at the Nashville Convention Center. The new product will begin shipping worldwide in early August. Also announced [...]

Security researcher Charlie Miller has revealed that Apple is working on a patch for a security flaw he identified in the iPhone's SMS implementation. The flaw can actually lead to arbitrary code execution, as he explained to Ars last month. Miller hasn't yet detailed the flaw, citing an agreement with Apple, though he and partner Vincenzo Iozzo plan to detail their discovery later this month at the Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas.

During a presentation at the SyScan security conference in Singapore, Miller explained that a vulnerability in the iPhone's handling of SMS messages makes it possible to send code instead of strictly text. Despite SMS's 140 byte size limitation, the iPhone can reassemble larger messages that are broken up to fit the limitation, which allows larger programs to be sent. The iPhone can be instructed to execute SMS data as code instead of text, and when it executes the code it does so with root privileges and without any interaction from the user.

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Fudzilla has heard from industry sources close to NVIDIA that a recent report claiming that Apple will be dropping NVIDIA-based designs for future Macs is false and that the companies' relationship is "just fine."

Apple is still buyin...

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We're kicking off our series exploring memorable gadgets from memorable people with one most influential tech giants: Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. – JC

OK...meaningful...here goes...

For that definition, it was probably an electronics learning kit I got for Christmas at about age 8 or 9. As I recall, it didn't teach electronics formulas or resistor codes, but was full of projects to hook up input devices like switches and output devices like buzzers and lights. It was like learning how to connect all the devices to your hi-fi, or connecting all your peripherals to a computer. It also gave me a good start toward understanding logic rules, like both switches have to be on for the light to shine, or if switch A is on, then switch B selects which light is on.

I call this one the most meaningful, because, pretty clearly to me, it preceded my other important gadgets and inspired me to like gadgets and to understand how to build some. It's like how the transistor led to the chip, which led to microprocessors, which led to personal computers. Everything goes back to the first invention, in that sense. This electronics kit gave me the understanding that made it easy to progress to large logic devices with multi-pole switches, and some relays, which then progressed to a large tic-tac-toe computer with transistors which progressed to a large adding/subtracting machine with transistors, etc.

The word 'meaningful' has the root 'meaning' which implies some emotion. In that sense, my first transistor radio, at about age 10, would fit the bill. It gave me portable music that I could listen to all night long as I slept, every night. 20 years later came the walkman, and 20 more years later came the iPod, but the real change in life, the one having the most 'meaning', was with the transistor radio.

I always wanted my own computer. With the Apple I, I now had a machine that I could program. I would never run out of things to do in my entire life. So it's a close runner up to the other two.

The gadget that has been the most attractive of attention ever is not my Segway. It's my nixie tube watch from CathodeCorner. It looks very large to other people and looks very strange. It's handmade in America too. The nixie tubes run on 140 volts on your wrist. Airport security guards who have seen every kind of watch ever made have a thrilling time with this watch.

I used to fly to Japan regularly to scour new gadgets, and always bought tons of things which were always surprising at the time, but looking back, few have special meaning. The first consumer digital camera, I think the Mavica technology, was meaningful. The first one for computers, not TV's, was the QuickTake from Apple. But in many ways, no digital camera to this day has been as good as the first Ricoh one.

The HP-35 calculator was also very meaningful in my life, as it led me to an incredible job designing for the follow-on models.

Much thanks to Woz for helping to kick off our series. Coming up soon: Phil Torrone, gadget maker and modder extraordinare.

Image credit: Sony Mav, HP Calculator

blackbearnh writes with this excerpt from O'Reilly Radar "Think about Wikipedia, what some consider the most complete general survey of human knowledge we have at the moment. Now imagine squeezing it down to fit comfortably on an 8GB iPhone. Sound daunting? Well, that's just what Patrick Collison's Encyclopedia iPhone application does. App Store purchasers of Collison's open source application can browse and search the full text of Wikipedia when stuck in a plane, or trapped in the middle of nowhere (or, as defined by AT&T coverage...)"

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