Appletell

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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There are Apple rumors, and then there are Apple rumors. Some fade into the ether, some linger for what seems like years until...well, until they come to pass. The latest of these is the rumor that Apple will be announcing iPhones for Verizon Wireless in 2009, perhaps as early as Macworld 2009 (guess they won’t be needing those reasons why Verizon is better than the iPhone).

9to5Mac reports that:

We’ve fielded a couple of tips (some more sketchy than others) about EVDO iPhones floating around Cupertino in the past, but today’s tipster seems a little bit more sure of himself.  Besides having some Verizon insider credentials, he seems to know way too much about Verizon-Apple politics. According to him, Apple will be announcing iPhones for Verizon Wireless in 2009, perhaps as early Macworld 2009. Negotiations between Apple and Verizon are ongoing but they expect to hammer out agreements by the end of the year.

Ah, so the tipster seems to “… know way too much about Verizon-Apple politics.” Must be true, then, eh? You sold me.

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The iPhone combines great user interface with almost infinite possibilities in application design. But, until now, there has been a relative dearth of useful office collaboration tools. Programs that are standard in every office suite—along the lines of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel—have had no real iPhone counterparts. Until today, that is.

Softalk has announced its aptly named “Spreadsheet” application for iPhone, available immediately from the App Store for a mere $7.99 (compared with $110 for a desktop version of Excel). Featuring a standard table layout with a formula bar on top, Spreadsheet allows you to format cells with everything from text and background colors to row/column size and in-cell text alignment. Cells can also be formatted to reflect the type of data they contain, with seven choices: general, number, currency, percentage, date, time or text. Spreadsheet also features in-app copy and paste functionality, allowing cells (or ranges of cells) to be copied and pasted within a worksheet. Sadly, this functionality does not extend to the entire iPhone interface.

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