The iPhones Home Screen is a thing of beauty, it looks great and is easy to use serving its purpose very well, but what else can it do. Well with a bit of imagination, the iPhone SDK and little but of know how you can use it as a canvas, literally.

I divided up the Mona Lisa into 20 squares and created 20 blank iPhone apps, saving one part of the image as the icon for each corresponding app.

Removing the app name below each icon was achieved by editing the “Bundle display name” in the application’s info.plist, I added a simple “!” to do this.

You may optionally remove the gloss and rounded corner effect added by default by ctrl clicking the info.plist file within xcode, opening it as a source code file and adding the following.

<key>UIPrerenderedIcon</key>

Inserting this key along with a blank app icon can be used to create blank spaces on your home screen.

Please send me your creations in a pre paid envelope to the usual address.

iPod Earbuds are smaller in Asia than those sold in the Western market
due to the smaller average Ear size in the East.

So for the first in this short series of Apps I couldn’t live without is NewsGator.
So what is NewsGator? Simply said it’s synchronized news feeds, doing for RSS what IMAP did for email.
News posts arrive on the server and are available for viewing via a very nice web based interface accessible from any computer.
Now there are several other services available which do just that, Google’s Reader being one of the most popular but where NewsGator comes into its own is that it has the ability to sync with its own Desktop and Mobile clients, which are available for Mac, Windows, iPhone & Java based handsets. So say for example I wake up in the morning and check my RSS feeds on NewsGators Mac client but only make my way through a few items before I have to head to work. So I get on the train and open up the iPhone client, which after automatically synchronizing displays the news items which I didn’t have time to read at home. By the time the train pulls in Iv read through all the feeds and put the iPhone away. Later on during the day I check online via the web based client at work and it shows me all the new news items since I got off the train.
Without NewsGator I would constantly be swamped with posts Iv already read or be faced with a mountain of new posts every time I get home.
Best of all its all free!

Tom

After trying day after day for the last couple weeks it appears the me.com mail servers finally went online within the last few hours, by using modified .Mac IMAP settings I sucessfully sent an email (probably the first in the world outside Cupertino!) from my me.com email address!
All you need is a .Mac Account and an email client such as Apple Mail (On OSX or iPhone), Thunderbird or “shudder” Outlook.
Feel free to try the settings as posted below and contact me (via the contact page of my site) or leave a comment if you have any luck!

Amazing how quickly things spread in the blogosphear, posted this last night and woke up to this:
http://gizmodo.com/5022434/how-to-mecom-mail-fully-working-set-it-up-now
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/07/06/me-com-mail-servers-online/

Tom

Back in 1998 Apple released what at the time was the most controversial computer of the decade.
The iMac did away with Apple’s conventional ports and replaced them with the now de facto USB, which at the time was still an emerging technology.
But even more so was Apple’s brave decision to completely ditch the internal floppy drive, a close to dead storage medium today.
Sound familiar? Well its no shock to see 10 year on Apple have taken the same approach to the MacBook Air as they did with the iMac. Gone is the CD/DVD drive and the same goes for a majority of the I/O. This may seem daring today but Apple are setting the tone for the future, pioneers I dare say.
Physical storage mediums are on the out, every piece of software imaginable can now be downloaded and purchased online and the same goes for Music and now with Apple’s movie rental service, over 1000 movies (which will no doubt grow in a similar fashion to Music on iTunes over the coming years.)
Of course this doesn’t come without a transition period though, External floppy drives where big sellers alongside iMacs for several years and the same will be true for the MacBook Air, Apple are offering an external “Superdrive” and even take advantage of a PC or Mac’s internal Drive over a network as if it was inside the Air.
By the looks of things USB hubs will be popular sellers over the coming years, but by building in the latest generation WIFI and Bluetooth 2.0 its clear that Apple sees the future as a wireless one.
Is it too far ahead of its time or will it cause a stir in the industry? Only time will tell.

After downloading the somewhat anticipated iPhone 1.1.3 update last night and having a day to play with it, after initially low expectations Iv got to say its grown on me. Firstly the Home screen (now screen’s) has been updated to allow users to customize it by rearranging icons and adding bookmark style “webclips” to the Home screen which not only remember what part of the web page to look at when touched but even produce a little image based on the web sites design, very nice! Icons can also be re arranged by holding your finger over an icon and they begin to wobble, indicating they are ready to be rearranged to your hearts content! You can even swap out the icons in the Dock and arrange them onto separate Home screens though the Dock icons remain consistent and feels similar to Spaces (A feature of Apples Desktop Operating System.)

Im a big fan of Maps and id be (literally) lost without it and its received a much deserved pampering in the update. Firstly The “Locate Me” feature pings nearby cell (mobile phone) towers/marsts to triangulate your position. Though I thought this would be a bit gimmicky at first I have found it to be very accurate, even to around 5-10 meters in built up areas though this can grow over 200 meters in rural areas! Especially useful for when you get lost in town though! From here you can get directions to nearby Restaurants, Cinemas ect and pretty much any address with a ZIP/Postal code. The user interface has also had a makeover, the cluttered lower menu has been replaced by an elegant eye style button which peals the map upwards in a flip board like fashion unveiling a drop pin button (which lets you drop and drag a pin to wherever you want for safekeeping), Show Traffic and the different views which now has a much welcome new member, Hybrid, which lets you view an overlay of road names on top of a satellite view, which is useful when looking out for landmarks and road names simultaneously.

The iPod also get a gloss of paint which new chapter support for movies as well as lyrics support, which may be a niche market but Im sure more than enough people are going to love it.

The iPod touch wasn’t left out in the cold though, new iPod Touches will come pre installed with the update while existing owners can upgrade for $20 (which isn’t bad considering it includes 5 new apps (Mail, Maps, Notes, Stocks and Weather) a slightly updated interface to bring it inline with the iPhone.
That pretty much sums up the update, but with the SDK on track for a Late February Launch, more iPhone love should be coming our way soon
keep your eyes pealed!

When I first saw Steve Jobs holding the MacBook Air I thought my eyes where deceiving me. Not only has it got pretty much he same horsepower as a MacBook with a new innovative multi touch trackpad but its also about a third of the thickness and three fifths the weight! Making it the worlds thinnest notebook.

When Apple say “Thinnovation” they really mean it, Intel had to shrink the Core 2 Duo chips by 60% to fit its beautiful wing like design which makes it appear to float above your desk while not compromising on speed. A nice surprise was the ability to use a Mac or even PC’s DVD drive over a network which more than makes up for the lack of an internal drive. It looks like those who want a fully fledged laptop which they cant feel in there bag have had there prayers answered!
I cant wait to get my hands (and drool) on one when they start appearing at the Apple Store.