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RSS feeds for the App Store
Filed under: App Store
John Gruber's heartfelt plea for iPhone App Store RSS feeds has now been answered.

Hands up if you, like John and me and probably a TUAWload of others, were frustrated at the lack of an obvious, easy-to-subscribe-to RSS feed of the latest additions to the App Store. The only solution was to view the complete list of iPhone apps and choose "Sort by: Release date". Not good enough. No.

The people at Pinch Media obviously felt the same way about this, and have announced a handy collection of four feeds (new apps; updated apps; top 100 free apps; and top 100 paid apps) for your subscribing pleasure.
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T-Mobile demands sipgate nix VoIP software
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Internet Tools, iPhone
Thilo Salmon, CEO of sipgate, Inc., wrote in to say that T-Mobile Germany has asked his company to cease and desist offering the company's flagship VoIP software.

In the letter from its lawyers, T-Mobile claims that sipgate is making the jailbreak process appear more attractive, which could lead customers to breaching their contracts.

According to Salmon, T-Mobile disallows jailbreaking, running VoIP, instant messaging, and VPN applications as part of its subscriber contract. Salmon notes, however, that sipgate only works via WiFi (and not GPRS or EDGE), and therefore does not run on T-Mobile's network. He says, "for the time being our users are safe."

sipgate doubts the legal veracity of the argument, and said it does not plan to comply with the order. Salmon said "we may need to fight this all the way through the courts." He also suggests that it's largely a government policy issue for Germany, and wants to lobby for a net-neutral environment for telecom carriers.

Tempest in a teacup? Apparently, it's a big deal in Germany. What, if any, "chilling effect" this will have on other VoIP software providers remains to be seen.
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Apple demands Psystar recall Mac clones
Filed under: Apple Corporate, Hardware, Apple Financial
We noted yesterday that the Mac clone maker, Psystar, was sued by Apple for copyright infringement, among other things. According to a recent ZDNet post, Apple wants Psystar to recall all of the Mac clones sold since April. "Psystar's actions have been committed with intent to damage Apple and to confuse and deceive the public," Apple claims.

"As a direct and proximate result of Psystar's infringing conduct, Apple has suffered and will continue to suffer lost sales and profits in an amount not yet fully ascertained in an amount to be proven at trial," Apple notes.

I really don't see how Psystar will be able to recover all of the Mac clones sold since April. But, if you bought one, would you send it back? I certainly wouldn't. Engadget, our sister blog, is also looking deeply into this high-profile lawsuit. They take a look at what each allegation means for both Apple and Psystar.
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Byline: Google Reader for your pocket
Filed under: App Store
As someone who manages whole metric scads of information in Google Reader, I was excited to see Byline, from Phantom Fish software, in the App Store.

Byline, as you might expect, fetches all your subscriptions from Google Reader and displays them for you to read. It also keeps track of the items you've read and starred.

The greatest thing, though, especially for iPod touch owners and subway riders is this: Starring or Noting an item saves it on your iPhone or iPod for offline reading. If you star an item either using your desktop browser, Mobile Safari, or Byline itself, it saves it for later. Noting an item is even better, because you can save pages that aren't even in your RSS subscriptions for offline reading with Byline. They mention you can do this very easily with a bookmarklet.

Now -- I can hear you screaming: NetNewsWire does all this, and it's free! Without boring you with detail, it's worth ten bucks to me to keep my Google Reader workflow the way it is, rather than spending time changing the way I work. Agreed: it's probably too steep for people who aren't heavily invested in Google Reader already.

Additionally on the downside, Byline doesn't allow you to browse by tag, instead opting to lump everything together in one list by date. Phantom Fish says this is for performance reasons, as people with many feeds would experience sluggish behavior. They're looking into it, though, and I personally hope they figure it out.

Byline is $9.99, awesome, and available through the App Store.
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Giles Turnbull says hello
Filed under: TUAW Business
Hello. I'm Giles Turnbull, and I'm the new boy round here. You can find out everything you could possibly wish to know about me from gilest.org, but to be honest the good stuff is buried in Google's archives. All the embarrassing posts, bad photographs, journalistic howlers, self-pitying confessionals, they're all there.

I gather there might be a few people reading this who enjoy using Macintosh computers. What a stroke of luck! I can waffle on about them for hours.
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Mac 101: Managing Dashboard widgets
Filed under: Mac 101
Is your Dashboard cluttered with tons of widgets that you don't want to see any longer? You can easily hide widgets from your Dashboard by holding down the option key while mousing over top of your widget and clicking the "x" button that shows up.

Clicking the "x" button does not, however, delete the widget -- it will only hide it. To delete a widget, click the "+" button in the bottom left corner (or hit the command and + key combo) then select the "Manage Widgets..." button. From this widget manager, you will be able to click the red minus button beside the widget to completely remove it from your Mac. The deleted widget will show up in the OS X trash can.
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iPhone 2.0 supports playback of WAV voicemail
Filed under: iPhone
If you've been aggravated at your iPhone or iPod touch in the past for its inability to play back WAV voicemail files from home phone services like Vonage or AT&T (synergy foul! yellow card), you may now breathe easier. TJ Luoma was 95% through building a rather elaborate script to convert incoming WAV voicemails to MP3 for iPhone playback (and, while he was at it, add some reverse lookup magic) when he discovered that the 2.0 firmware now includes the ability to play back the particular flavor of WAV file used in these voicemails. Problem solved.

It may not be a headline feature (or even a stealthy but universally acclaimed UI addition) but for those of us who need it, it's going to save a lot of time and trouble.

Thanks to TJ & to Curt for independently sending this one in.
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iPhone's Mail lacks no-images switch
Filed under: iPhone
Most desktop messaging clients (Apple's Mail.app and Microsoft's Entourage among them) give users the option to skip loading images when reading rich-formatting emails, which both speeds up the loading/reading process and limits exposure to spammer scavenging, which can leverage embedded images to verify that the evil emails were received by a valid address. The iPhone's version of Mail, however, doesn't give users the option to turn images off, as pointed out by Stefan Seiz. This has been the case all along and hasn't been corrected in 2.0, unfortunately.

While this exposure is less of a problem if you've got good spam filtering in place, it does raise an interesting question: wouldn't an optional images-off mode be ideal if you wanted to speed up your iPhone's mail performance, or (perish the thought!) limit your data usage on a less-than-ideal service plan. Unfortunately I don't think adding features and options to Mail is within the official capacity of third-party devs, so we're going to have to wait for Apple to address this directly.
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Found footage: The Soup's iPhone parody
Filed under: Humor, iPhone

We love a good parody, and E!'s The Soup has produced a winner. For the unfamiliar, The Soup is a television show on the E! network that pokes fun at TV and pop culture in America.

Here's a parody iPhone ad that ran on the show earlier this week. It's really funny, with an emphasis on the pricing changes the iPhone has experienced in its first year of existence.

While we're on the topic, here are a few other Apple parodies you'll enjoy
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iPod touch 1.1.5 software also available
Filed under: iPod Family
Apple yesterday released an update for iPod touch for those users who don't want to pony up the ten bucks for the 2.0 software update. However, Macworld could discern no difference between 1.1.4 and 1.1.5, and no release notes are available.

I'd conjecture that the same security fixes that were included in the 2.0 update are included in this one, similar to the way Tiger is still updated with security patches. At least, I hope that's the case.

Obviously, no functionality is offered as a part of the update: you'll have to spring for the 2.0 update for that.

You can download the update via iTunes by clicking "Check for Updates" with your iPod connected to your computer, and opting out of the 2.0 upgrade.

Thanks, David and Toon, for the tip!
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Apple extends MobileMe subscriptions by 30 days
Filed under: MobileMe
Apple has extended every MobileMe subscription by a month, due to the exceptionally ornery transition this past week.

"The .Mac to MobileMe transition was a lot rockier than we had hoped," Apple spokesman Bill Evans told Macworld. "We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge."

An email sent to subscribers noted that "we have worked through those problems, and the web apps are now up and running," but several pages of comments from our readers suggest otherwise. TUAW staff with MobileMe accounts agreed yesterday that the service is mostly working, but still quirky.

Also in the email, the MobileMe team has promised to stop using the word "push" to describe some aspects of MobileMe's functionality "until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too." This might suggest they're closing the loop on MobileMe's push technology for all connected devices.

Hopefully this goes a long way to assuage the burning, burning rage that MobileMe users have been feeling recently.

(You can read the full letter, after the jump.)

Thanks, Rick, Frank, Mark, Chuck and James for the tip!
Continue reading Apple extends MobileMe subscriptions by 30 days
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Apple prepping iPhone 2.1 software
Filed under: Rumors, iPhone
The folks at The Boy Genius Report spent some time poking around server logs and found references to iPhone OS 2.0.1. It seems that build 5B101 is the 2.0.1 software for first-generation iPhones, while 5B103 is for 3G iPhones.

No word on what's included, of course, or when this might hit iTunes. According to AppleInsider, some people are having trouble with the camera and the accelerometer since the update. Have any of you 1st generation iPhone owners had software trouble since the update? Here's hoping this update will solve the problem.
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Ruling the world requires an iPhone
Filed under: Odds and ends, iPhone
I'm pretty sure that the SDK license agreement explicitly forbids super-villainous activities, but no silly piece of paper (or PDF) is going to stop Dr. Horrible. The would-be world ruler who can't catch a break (either from his laundromat crush or from arch-nemesis Captain Hammer) is seen using his iPhone to remote-control a van in the debut episode of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, the three-part Internet mini musical from Buffy & Firefly creator Joss Whedon. Clearly, the grand cinematic iPhone tradition of Journeyman lives on.

Close examination of Doc H's UI indicates that he's actually using Mobile Safari to steer his van, so perhaps that's how he's remaining on the right side of the EULA -- although that radioactive icon on the left is quite ominous. If you want to see it in action for yourself, check the gallery below, watch Act I for free on drhorrible.com (which is getting Captain Hammered itself right now, so you may have to wait a while) or pick up the episode on iTunes.

Thanks Eric

Gallery: Doctor Horrible's iPhone
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