Third-party add-ons

If I were still in college, I would be one of the coolest kids using my iPhone to record lectures. I would proudly place in on the desk and press record....but how?

That’s what iPhone Recorder offers, together with the ability to directly record audio to ringtones without any computer necessary!

Dynamic volume adjustment, channel and bitrate control, and a choice of mp3, mp4 and aac file formats round out a decent range of options; you can also directly attach them to an email from the app itself.

Right now (AppStore coming soon!) iPhone Recorder requires a Jailbroken handset, and if that so happens to be the case, you’ll have to pay $30.00 which is kind of pricey if you ask me.

It is great to see some recording capabilities open up though. Go ahead and get yourself a copy, and tell me how you like it.

In a smart move, Google has opened up it’s APIs to iPhone SDK. What does that mean?

In a Google blog posts:

“Perhaps you want your iPhone software to send photos to a Picasa Web Albums account, or keep a journal of phone calls automatically in Blogger. Maybe your iPhone application accesses a database of information from a Google Spreadsheet or from Google Base. With the Google Data APIs Objective-C Client Library, creating software for these tasks is straightforward.” “If you are writing iPhone software, just drag the “GData Sources” group folder from the GData project file into your iPhone project, and use the GData APIs as you would when writing a Mac application. ”

Take a look.

While recent news reports generated anticipation that Apple’s iPhone SDK would at last allow for a native version of Flash, Adobe has since said that a solution won’t be as simple as they thought.

“A fully functional version that ran within a web browser would require far more integration than the SDK allows.” “Adobe has evaluated the iPhone SDK and can now start to develop a way to bring Flash Player to the iPhone,” the statement reads. “However, to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone web-browsing experience we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it. We think Flash availability on the iPhone benefits Apple and Adobe’s millions of joint customers, so we want to work with Apple to bring these capabilities to the device.”

The SDK currently restricts any third-party software from running in the background or launching any sort of code of its own, both of which pose some problems for an embedded program such as Flash, in addition to other programs like AIM.

Flash is highly anticipated for many users and I am… more...

So it is not built in and the beauty and simplicity from Apple that we are all use to, but if you just can’t wait to get your hands on Exchange, try this out.

iAnywhere acts as a middle-man between Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domnio servers, providing IMAP and SMTP accessible Exchange/Domino services to the iPhone while requiring no changes to the actual mail servers.

This allows companies to maintain security by keeping IMAP closed, but offer access through the iPhone’s native Mail client rather than a Web-based interface.

iAnywhere also offers features such as restricting attachments, preventing user access and removing email data from a remote device.

iAnywhere is expected to be released within the next two weeks and you can check out a video here.

I’m not much of a software developer, but I decided to download the iPhone SDK and play around with it anyway. I started the download this morning and I’m still waiting for it to finish- the file is no smaller than 2.1 gigabytes! My impatience finally took over and I desperately searched for a glimpse of what was to come. If you’re in a similar conundrum, or if you’d just like a peek at what developers will be using to create your favorite iPhone applications in the future, head over to TUAW for a myriad of screenshots from the iPhone Software Developer Kit.

Link: TUAW

In case you haven’t heard, the BBC just released their popular iPlayer web portal for the iPhone platform. I decided to point my iPhone browser to the iPlayer to check things out. Here are my first impression:

1. It works
Life just keeps getting better and better, guys. We’re happy to report that the iPlayer provides a great portal to access some of the network’s most popular content with an intuitive interface. There really is no comparison for this release.

2. Content is limited
Aye, here’s the rub. Much like what happened with YouTube when the iPhone was first shipped, not all programs are available through iPlayer yet, as they are probably being re-encoded to the Apple codec. BBC says 100% of the content will be available soon. Plus, most programs can only be played in the U.K.

3. The radio (podcast directory) is the best part
Sure, watching videos is great, but we already have that with YouTube! The iPlayer radio opens up a whole new content area to iPhone users. Unfortunately, the iPlayer doesn’t work over EDGE, so you won’t exactly be able… more...

If there’s one thing we were hoping to get from yesterday’ iPhone SDK event, it was VoIP support. I really didn’t expect Apple to support VoIP, as their agreement with AT&T is already showing its weaknesses, and letting customers forgo the network entirely seemed unlikely. Luckily, Apple went ahead and proved us all wrong, announcing that developers would have access to VoIP technology over WiFi on the iPhone.

What’s the catch? Apple will only allow VoIP to function if the iPhone is connected to a WiFi network, so it won’t work over EDGE. Basically, what this does is prevent AT&T customers from transforming their unlimited data plan into an unlimited phone plan. Despite that limitation, it’s nice to see Apple addressing a common request from developers and customers.

Rumors continue to trickle in about the iPhone’s imminent SDK but the outlook does not look good.

Erica Sadun reports that the SDK should ship on schedule for late February but be in crippled form and the full package won’t be out until April. A Simulator will be made readily available.

It wouldn’t be surprising if there were delays, Google has dedicated more time than Apple to developing their SDK and mobile OS. Apple jumped up to get a SDK out when the announced October.

Via: TUAW

Apple’s user base was shocked when Steve Jobs so nonchalantly proclaimed the Internet would be the iPhone’s only means of using any 3rd party Software when in reality it was comparing a toddler’s bike to a Corvette. But when the community spoke up and had their wishes fulfilled, all that was left to do was wait until February but now we might need to wait some more.

The upside if you can call it that, Apple will be giving developers a simulator to make Application creation that much easier. While it’s practically a requirement, it could be used as a valid reason to delay the SDK if rumors coming Erica Sadun’s way are true.

Nothing has been confirmed but Apple’s word has been February for the SDK release and they’ve often waited until the very end to ship out what they announced. It wouldn’t be surprising if there was a slight delay, they’ve already pushed back the AppleTV update probably to focus more on the iPhone’s SDK.

Via: Ars Technica: Infinite Loop

Now that we can save webclips to our iPhone home screens, there is a way to create a speed dial icon for your home screen. Go to Springlets.com on your iPhone and key in a commonly used number. You will be able to webclip it and voila! you have a speed dial icon on your home screen. No more trying to navigate through your contacts or recent numbers to dial the same number.

As a bonus, a visit to Springlets will also give you the opportunity to create shortcuts to searches on Wikipedia, Chowhound, IMDB, and the “I’m feeling lucky” Google feature.

Also, if you are sick of your slow EDGE connection trying to load an image-heavy site, use the Text springlet which pulls a text-only version of the site via Google’s Mobile Proxy feature.

I have installed all of these and all work flawlessly.