04/02/2012

How to reset the iPhone OS 4.0 (beta) home screen wallpaper

09/04/2010 By

Those of you who installed the first iPhone OS 4.0 beta released just yesterday, might have changed the home screen wallpaper.

One can do so via Settings > Wallpaper.

Unfortunately, the nice silver metal rain drops sprinkled default wallpaper that comes with iPhone OS 4.0 beta is not yet available as a photo in the 4.0′s library.

As a result, you cannot revert back to it if you changed the wallpaper just once.

At first, I did not find the original version in the wild but stumbled upon a really beautiful replacement. Download it from deviantART.

The original Apple wallpaper is available, too. Grab it.

Note: Do not sync wallpapers via iTunes!

iTunes tends to “optimize” images before sync, which makes them appear distorted when used as a wallpaper.

Instead email the image to yourself, open the email on your device, long press the image and save it to your camera roll.

Set it as your new home screen wallpaper and you’re done.

Filed Under: All Things Apple, News Tagged With: , ,

JSON Framework 2.2 for iPhone (and Cocoa) released

05/06/2009 By

Stig Brautaset has released version 2.2 of the very popular JSON.framework for Cocoa and the iPhone. You can grab the .dmg or visit the project home over at Google Code.

Here is the list of significant changes compared to version 2.1, copied 1:1 for your reading convenience courtesy of Stig’s blog post:

New, fresh API—particularly for errors

Extracted the SBJsonWriter and SBJsonParser classes from the SBJSON class. These present a fresh, simple API. If a method returns nil, you can now simply call a method to get an array of NSError objects containing the error trace.

The SBJSON class is now a facade, implementing its old interface by forwarding messages to instances of the new classes. Additionally, the facade also implements the new simplified interface of the SBJsonWriter and SBJsonParser classes.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Development Tagged With: , , ,

Watch out the App Store for SIZZ!

06/05/2009 By

SIZZ has been reviewed by Apple and is now available worldwide. Follow this direct iTunes download link to get SIZZ!

The fine folks at The App Dojo are too busy to finish their website and if it would be up to me, they should forget about it and continue to focus on building intriguing games for the iPhone and other mobile gaming platforms.

I’ve had the pleasure to test drive an early version of SIZZ, their upcoming debut title for the iPhone and iPod touch. Being pretty much a casual gamer I loved Iconfactoy’s Frenzic and the now world-famous Trism by demiforce.

SIZZ is my personal new favorite!

I’ve rolled out the preview version to my entire family and we all became immediate SIZZ fans.

 

The game has all the ingredients which lets it easily stand in line with Frenzic and Trism:

Great Visuals

The App Dojo has done a great job in working out detailed graphics, smooth animations and an overall extremely polished look. In a mixture between the arcade style games of the 80′s and the modern, glossy look that we’ve all come so used to SIZZ delivers a pleasant, eye-pleasing overall user experience.

Simple and extremely Addictive Game Play

In SIZZ you’ve got to close path by placing and rotating tiles. The more you progress the more complex the tiles get and, of course, you constantly get less time to make your decisions. Most of the games that fall into the puzzle/Tetris category share an overall simplistic basic game idea. Many titles I’ve seen for the iPhone fail to deliver a great gaming experience. SIZZ is a fantastic exception: The fundamental game concept is based on a real-world board game, envisioned years ago by SIZZ’ graphic designer Peter Dahmen. The App Dojo’s Sascha Sigges has done an outstanding job in transferring this concept to the iPhone platform and giving it its unique ascetics and a high-performance game engine.

20 Preview Invites

The App Dojo is offering 20 readers to get access to the preview version while SIZZ is being reviewed by Apple. Simply use the Contact link at the top to let me know you’re interested and I’ll make sure you get a fresh copy of SIZZ right from the source.

SIZZ is currently under Apple’s review. We’re going to update this post once it becomes available for purchase. The App Store price will be 1.99 US$.

SIZZ for the iPhone

SIZZ for the iPhone

SIZZ for the iPhone

SIZZ for the iPhone

Filed Under: Apps Tagged With: , , ,

Best RSS Feed Reader for the iPhone

07/02/2009 By

I haven’t done many iPhone application reviews or recommendations on 24100.net because there are so many other sites which do just that. Today I want to quickly point you to Feeds (link opens iTunes) which got released to the App Store the first week of January.

Feeds

Feeds

The German App Store returns more than 100 RSS related applications and I’ve certainly not tested them all but I did trie a lot. Google Reader syncing is one of my key requirements as I’m heavily using Google’s web based feed manager to go through my daily updates. If this is also one of your requirements, it significantly limits the number of options.

For almost a year I’ve been a loyal user of Byline. Byline has a decent user interface, syncs perfectly well with Google Reader and provides you with a good overview of what’s new and hot even if – like me – you’ve subscribed to 30+ feeds. The biggest issue I’ve had with Byline was performance and the fact that I could not add feeds from within the iPhone app itself. So in case I’d discovered a great new feed while I’ve been on the move, I had to wait to access a Mac to add the feed via Google Reader’s web interface and then sync it to the iPhone.

While Byline became recognizably slower with a growing number of feeds I always thought this might not entirely be the developers fault. Maybe syncing with Google Reader’s APIs did not allow for a better performance. It’s been Prime31 Web Design’s Feeds that told me the better.

Feeds feels about 20 times as fast as Byline! I cannot provide any real numbers but purely from an end user’s perception Feeds is just amazingly fast. Once I got used to its performance, I’ve never touched Byline again.

Besides this Feeds supports many other features, too:

  •  Star feed items
  • Share feed items
  • Email feed descriptions and links
  • Categorize feeds into folders
  • Read feeds offline
  • Integrated view of the web version
  • Tag feeds
  • Add feeds to InstantPaper

Some of them depend on having a Google Reader account (sharing and tagging) but Feeds can also be used as a standalone RSS reader.

Feeds

Feeds

Feeds is available in the App Store for 2,39 €.

Filed Under: Apps Tagged With: , , ,

Multitasking coming to the iPhone?

04/02/2009 By

iphone3gAt the last Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) Apple announced a push notification service. This centrally Apple managed service would allow developers to create iPhone applications that get notifications of new data without the necessity of running said app in the background. Steve Jobs explained that many of the instability issues of current smartphones are actually caused by poorly implemented multitasking and crappy third-party apps. Therefore Apple made a strategic decision to prevent any third party app from running in the background. Jobs stated that Apple does not consider “simply allowing apps to run in the background” the right solution for this common problem and until “really finding a perfect solution Apple would not allow background processes to ruin the great iPhone user experience and performance”.

Notification services did surface in beta versions of the iPhone SDK but got pulled out shortly thereafter. Since then Apple never updated the developer community about the state of affairs.

Since Instant Messaging, Reminders and many other type of applications rely on the ability to receiving updates (from the cloud) even when they are not active, the absence of a solution started to annoy developers. In addition many great applications running seamlessly in the background became available in the jailbreaking community.

According to MacRumors, Apple may be considering background processes after all.

MacRumors states that a part of the 3.0 iPhone firmware, users might be able to decide on a per-application basis which app would be allowed to run in the background. This change might come in light of the enhanced processing capabilities which are expected for the next iPhone hardware release in the June timeframe.

Filed Under: All Things Apple Tagged With: ,

More App Store Confusion

03/02/2009 By

Yesterday something cool happened: TAXIRUF, one of our iPhone applications, hit the “New & Featured” list in iTunes and the device store. We were experiencing a peak in downloads and wondering why. In the past we saw this happening when Mac Life, TechCrunch and others were reviewing our apps so we googled for reviews. Finally we found out about the updated and very prominent listing of TAXIRUF on iTunes.

Taxiruf iTunes Listing

Taxiruf iTunes Listing

While we definitely appreciate this move and do feel honored, we once again wondered about the statistical analytics Apple applies. We already knew that the review system is, well, far from ideal. Now we add “Featured & New” listings to the what-the-heck-goes on bucket.

Taxiruf App Store Listing

Taxiruf App Store Listing

Here is why: TAXIRUF was submitted to Apple during the first week of September 2008. It got approved September 17th, 2008. Shortly thereafter it hit the Top 10 Sold apps. Since then TAXIRUF moderately continues to sell across Germany.

So what’s the reason for the application to appear on the “Featured & New” list five months too late? And in light of this how reliable are all the other ratings and listings? Or is it all a big mess?

By the way, just in case anybody from Apple happens to read this: We’re not asking to remove TAXIRUF from its current prominent place. In fact we do like heavy download days. Messed analytics constitute a problem but having an app on the iTunes landing page is just fantastic!

Filed Under: All Things Apple Tagged With: ,

Guest blogging at iphone-notes.de

03/02/2009 By

I feel honored to announce that starting as of today I’m going to co-author posts on iPhone-notes.de. The site is 100% dedicated to the German speaking market so I thought it would be a perfect idea to further separate my various activities in this field and contribute to one of the most popular German speaking independent iPhone sites.

Those running jailbroken iPhones (I myself don’t as for the professional iPhone apps development business it’s important to have a model which is compliant with the ones shipped by Apple) definitely know iPhone-notes.de and it’s linked Installer/Cydia repository – sendowski.de – as it still is one of the most favorite sources for iPhone tooling and software.

I’m looking very much forward to working with Andre on expanding iPhone-notes.de reach and keeping you up-to-date with the latest and greatest in Apple Smartphone Land.

More announcements to come. Stay tuned!

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: , ,

iPhone Visual Dial

03/02/2009 By


Filed Under: All Things Apple Tagged With: ,