Appletell

I was awoken this morning by a text message from o2, which read, “iPhone 3G is here. The iPhone you have been waiting to early upgrade to. Order from 8am today.“

Yup! If you’re an o2 customer/wannabe customer, you can now pre-order the iPhone 3G at o2’s website! o2 say that pre-orders are on a first-come, first-served basis, and if you order sooner, there’s a bigger chance it will arrive on July the 11th via courier!

If you’re going through the upgrade route, you will need to visit the o2 iPhone upgrade page where you will be asked to type in your iPhone mobile number. You will then receive a text message with an upgrade code, which you must then enter before the upgrade process can continue.

The website is acting extremely erratically (at time of writing), whether this is due to traffic or o2 not getting their web page up in time is unknown. The upgrade site currently throws me between being able to order the phone and a maintenance page (8 a.m., ey’ o2?).

No word on how new customers are getting on, but I have a feeling they might not be having as much trouble. I haven’t as yet been able to pre-order my 3G iPhone. Come on o2, fix your website!

Happy iPhone 3G pre-ordering UK o2 customers.

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Softpress announced a new version of their flagship web design software for OS X, Freeway 5. The visual page layout-style interface of Freeway is what separates it from other traditional web design software. Its intuitive interface makes graphics and web designers alike feel comfortable using it. Freeway 5 brings some new features, including the ability to create CSS-based menus, Google Actions, dynamic effects from script.aculo.us, sliced background images, new background and graphic effects, save archive, iPhoto integration, color labeling and many more.

Freeway Pro now has multiple output options, a full output encoding choices, color and text style management across the entire document, extended graphic import capabilities, multiple style sheets for each document, full CSS text styling and CSS layout, and more.

Freeway 5 costs $249 for the Pro version and $79 for the Express version. Upgrades from previous releases are available for discounted prices, and you can also download a free trial from their website.

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Users and developers have realized that the iPhone SDK may be far away or it may be close, but this hasn’t stopped them from creating various web apps. Lots of web apps have came out and we’ve even done a post on 5 useful iPod Touch and iPhone Web Apps One more web app you can take advantage of before an SDK comes out, or your too scared to jailbreak your iPhone, are Springlets. These are customized web clips that support a collection of sites that sit on your home screen of your iPhone or iPod Touch. Magnetism Studios, the creators of Springlets describe how you can make use of them:

Lets say you want to view the wikipedia page for Applesauce. The old way would have you opening Safari, tapping the search field, typing in “Applesauce Wikipedia,“ waiting for the google search results to load, tapping the proper entry and waiting for the wikipedia page to load.

With Springlets you could easily spring to a large base of info, quickly, with your fingertips.

• Apple launches new iPhone Your Life site
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Net stats are basically statistics of what operating systems are being used to browse the internet, these are provided by a company called Net Applications, who specialize in delivering internet statistics. In November 2007, the Mac user share had reached an all-time high of 6.8%. The latest reports from Net Applications confirm that in just one month, the Mac user share has risen to 7.3% in December - at the expense of Windows users. Windows was 92.4% in November 2007, and was only 91.8% in December 2007.

This shows the Mac user base is ever-increasing and obviously the majority of these users are switching from Windows. These statistics give us proof that, although Windows is by far the largest operating system out there, the Mac is catching up extremely quickly and Windows is going down at the same time. This is likely due to Vista, a big mistake from Microsoft, as the users are unhappy with the performance of this operating system on their current machines and are having to upgrade their graphics cards, RAM and processor to cope with the unnecessary “visual enhancements” that Vista brings.

Via [AppleInsider]

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Apple has posted, in a lovely new design, it’s iPhone web development guidelines on the Apple Developer Connection site. The document give tips such as “think windowless”, “adjust text size for readability”, and “lay out forms appropriately”. It also delves into how to integrate a web app with iPhone’s built-in applications and summarizes which technologies the iPhone, and it’s underlying Safari browser, full support. If you are even interested in potentially developing an app for the iPhone, this is the document to read.

Read [Apple.com] via [MacRumors]

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If you are lucky enough to own an iPhone or any other digital media player, Movavi has introduced a service that allows anyone to convert their videos on-the-fly, and without taking up your computer’s valuable CPU resources. There are many services like this out there, but few provide the simplicity and ease of use that Movavi Online does.

Movavi makes it simple by leading you through a three step process. Select your video file, select the output format, and enter in your email address. Movavi will instantly upload the video to their servers, and then allow you to continue your browsing, while the video is being converted over the internet. What I really enjoy about this service is that they will email you with a link to the movie when they are done.

This service can be very useful for people that have slower computers, or want to convert a video that is on somebody else’s computer. They also include some handy widgets for easy accessibility. This service coupled with an iPhone can be the killer workflow that will make getting videos onto the iPhone simple and fast.

At the risk of sounding cheesy, “set it, and forget it!“

Read [Movavi]

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Just two weeks after Safari 3.0 was announced for Windows, Apple has announced yet another update, Safari 3.0.2. This beta version isn’t exactly a major release; version 3.0.2 eliminates a multitude of bugs and fixes the mysteriously disappearing text in several situations.

Safari’s website also shows several new features on the way, including better support for international users, FTP directory listings, tool-tips, cookie management and LiveConnect support. If you’d like to try it out, surf on over to Apple’s website to grab your copy.

Read [Apple.com]

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Ever since the announcement that

developer’s would be pissed off

iPhone apps would be web based, web and Mac developers alike have been creating and testing apps to work on the upcoming mobile phone. About six of these “mobile apps” are available and ready to use as of now. The digg, OneTrip, Gas, iPhoneChat, My First Mac, iTweeter, and Amazon apps are all up and working, and can all be tested and tried out on a normal, desktop-based browser. Although none of them can be tested on the actual iPhone yet, they are supposed to work. However, in my opinion, these aren’t “true apps”, and am waiting for a true iPhone SDK to be announced.

• Walmart will sell iPhone, just not for the holidays
• Google’s “Lively” is gonna be dead
• Apple launches new iPhone Your Life site

Yesterday at Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote, he made it clear that Apple was not going to make the same mistake with the iPhone that other device manufacturers have made with theirs. Manufacturers such as Palm have taken the open source stance on third-party application support, which has really become a complete hands-off approach. Apple on the other hand, is making sure that they can stand behind the security of their product by closing things off more than Palm has.

With the kind of support that Jobs mentioned, the applications will run via Safari - for security reasons - and will be limited in what information they can access from the phone. So the apps will really need to leverage the power of the web using technologies such as AJAX. It will be interesting to see how the apps turn out. Developers… start your engines, and we’ll see you on the 29th.

• Google’s “Lively” is gonna be dead
• Apple launches new iPhone Your Life site
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