Appletell

Guy Kawasaki, the original Apple Evangelist, columnist for Macworld and current tech entrepreneur has some simple advice for Apple on the iPhone: open up the development process.

His point is that Apple doesn’t need to exert a huge amount of control over the iPhone app market. The best way to excite developers and users is to have a wide-open market for software, he said.

For those of you two young to remember, Kawasaki was, for many early Mac users, the voice of Apple enthusiasm, sincerely speaking about the greatness of their products and the ways in which they could be used. The recent brouhaha over Apple’s reasoning for disallowing iPhone apps has lead some to call for the return of a public face for the company, who could explain their reasoning, rather than simply issuing authoritarian press releases (or, in true Apple style, simply refusing to comment on the issue altogether).

But the tone of the Macworld piece is much more of a “catching up with an old friend"-ish one: Kawasaki is not (apparently) planning on returning to Apple soon, and is happily working behind the scenes with several tech companies, including one that makes news aggregation even simpler than RSS. As a bonus, Macworld has republished two of his old articles, one lightheartedly comparing the Quadra 800 to a ride in an F-15, and an oddly prescient one about why the Newton should be more like a cell phone.

Read [Macworld]

MacRumors has gotten word that the newest version of the beta for iPhone firmware 2.2 contains more than just bug fixes. The update was marked as “compatibility testing,” and we’re finally finding out just what Apple is testing the compatibility of.

Check out the new features after the break.

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Apple has finally allowed a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) program to be made available for the iPhone. Fring is available now at the iTunes store for free, and allows users to make voice communications over a wireless network using Fring’s network, or “Skype, Skype-out or any SIP providers you chose.” Users can also place calls to phone numbers using the service.

Fring also claims:

You will have one searchable contact list with all your instant messaging buddies from Skype, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, Twitter, Yahoo! and AIM, so you can easily see whose available and where they can be reached before dialing or starting a live chat session.

The Fring user guide is also available as a PDF.

Product [Fring]

While most sites which offer online services are rushing to get into the iPhone hype, the web’s top photo sharing site, Flickr, doesn’t want to join the party yet with a native iPhone app of its own. Instead, Flickr is enhancing its Flickr mobile site to make it more iPhone-friendly. Others who have rushed into making their iPhone apps available in the iTunes apps store have failed to satisfy iPhone users, whereas Flickr’s mobile site has came up with a robust and satisfying Flickr experience on the iPhone.

The redesigned Flickr mobile site has higlighted the most frequently and widely used features of the Flickr website and made it quickly accessible once users visit the mobile site using their iPhone. These features—which are all included in the top-screen navigation—are Activity, Contacts and a Link to more Flickr features. In addition, photos are now automatically scaled to fit the iPhone screen. Unfortunately, when displaying photos, other sizes available are not accessible and viewable. And interestingly, the touch-enabled photo enlargement and shrinking feature cannot be performed with the photos. Scrolling through the photos is now better done, although not as seamless as the web-based Flash enabled Flickr site.

Despite its minor flaws, the iPhone-enhanced Flickr mobile is still a useful alternative for the lack of a native Flickr app. To visit the site, just point your iPhone’s Safari browser to m.flickr.com.

Read [News.com]

As the 2008 presidental contest heats up, the candidates are increasingly taking advantage of technology and social media to connect with their supporters. Today, the Obama campaign released an iPhone/iPod Touch application which will allow supporters to track and coordinate their volunteering efforts, as well as receive updates regarding their candidate. 

What’s interesting to me is that the app also adds a competitive element, allowing users to track the calls they’ve been making against a leaderboard.

Jump past the break to see the full list of features.

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Throughout gaming history, there have been many popular men: Pac Man, Mega Man, Ms. Pac Man, Mega Man 2, Pac Man, Jr., Mega Man 3, and so on. Another of these is Bomberman; a little man who may actually be a robot with a white helmet who runs around mazes and blows stuff up. The franchise has been around forever, gracing pretty much every gaming system you can remember, and many you cannot (ZX Spectrum? Sharp MZ-700?). Recently, Bomberman could be found blasting himself free from the confines of your iPod. Now, he’s found his way to the iPhone/iPod touch. I guess when you’re Hudson Soft and you don’t have a lot of franchises to milk, you gotta milk the ones you do have for all they’re worth. And so…

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Got an Airport Express Base Station or an AppleTV? Got a whole mess of music on a central computer? Then you, my friend, could be streaming your music through your home stereo system, and Macworld tells you how:

If you have an AirPort Express Base Station, string an audio cable between its audio port and an input port on a stereo receiver or powered speakers. Launch AirPort Utility (found in /Applications/Utilities), select your AirPort Express, configure it so it’s part of your network, and click the Music tab. In this tab enable the Enable AirTunes option and click Update. Your AirPort Express is now ready to receive music streamed to it from iTunes.

And there’s even more, including how to set up your AppleTV to stream music, and how to use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a remote control. It’s the world of tomorrow, today!

Via [Macworld]

Manga/anime artist Yoshitoshi ABe, creator and contributor to such series as Serial Experiments Lain and Haibane Renmei recently spoke at

Mr. Yoshitoshi is a huge Mac fan, maintaining a homepage on Mac.com, releasing a self-published manga (known as “dojinshi") for the iPhone in 20 countries and sneaking references to Apple products into his work.

After some difficulty in finding a DVI adapter for his Macbook Air, ABe began his presentation (through a translator) by talking about the human eye, and the iPhone.

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Steve Ballmer, already famous for his dancing skills, has pulled off a spectacular 180º pirouette in his position on Apple. In an email earlier this summer, Ballmer addressed Apple’s rising threat to Microsoft’s operating system dominance, telling staffers Apple’s success was:

Because they [Apple] are good at providing an experience that is narrow but complete, while our commitment to choice often comes with some compromises to the end-to-end experience. Today, we’re changing the way we work with hardware vendors to ensure that we can provide complete experiences with absolutely no compromises. We’ll do the same with phones—providing choice as we work to create great end-to-end experiences.

In the interview with Ann Winblad, a partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Ballmer neatly about-faced this position. Discussing current market-leader Nokia’s 30% position, Ballmer stated, “If you want to reach more than that, you have to separate the hardware and software in the platform.” This, obviously, is the same model that propelled Microsoft to dominance in desktop computing with the Windows OS, and it is exactly what Ballmer vowed to Think Different about in his memo!

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OS X Reality put up a fairly interesting article listing 16 reasons why the iPhone and iPod touch are better systems to have around than the Sony PSP. I’ve never played with a PSP, so I’m afraid I can’t vouch for any of the items on the list. In typical fashion, though, it seems some are valid, some are stretches, and some are a bit misleading.

The article is an interesting read with some good points, and it’s something to keep handy as the holiday shopping season approaches.

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