On rebelscum a member is doing a survey for one of their classes. As an incentive to get people to take the survey he is giving away a free Star Wars figure in a drawing. A name is drawn every time after 5 people have entered. I just found out I won in yesterdays drawing. The figure sent out is random, so we’ll see what I get. Can’t beat a free figure.
Phonesaber has been pulled from the App store. The developer that created Phonesaber has this posted on their website:
“Good news and bad news, PhoneSaber fans.
As of now, PhoneSaber will no longer be available, I’ve had a chat with a guy from THQ Wireless (who own the rights for Star Wars apps on mobiles) and as we were always expecting, PhoneSaber is not allowed to be on there. It was a very friendly chat, and the future of PhoneSaber was discussed.
They want to do some sort of official, Star Wars branded version of PhoneSaber, and will be working with us on that one. We’re really excited about this – it means that PhoneSaber has the potential to be even better than it originally was! I don’t know any information beyond that, whether they plan to charge for it, advertise with it or what, but we’ll keep you updated on as much as we’re allowed to tell you.
Apologies to everyone who loved PhoneSaber, we didn’t really have much choice in the matter, but we’re certain that the new, official, PhoneSaber will be even more great than the original was!
TheMacBox will be continuing to make awesome stuff, including some great pay-for games, and some more awesome free apps.
Update: Since this post has now hit the internet, just want to clarify a few things:
Now that it has been almost a month since I got my iPhone I thought I would do a post about my experience so far. Overall I am very happy with this phone and what it can do. The games which involve the accelerometer are very cool and a lot of fun. I can see many future games using this feature.
Most reviewers list the following for the cons of the phone: no mms support, no bluetooth stereo headset support, no way to record video with the camera, no copy and paste. The only feature that I really would like out of these is copy and paste. Supposedly Apple is working on it and it will be added, but they are working on an intuitive way of doing it. As to the other features missing I only recorded video once on my Treo, Receive maybe 1 mms message a year which I can still get the message in Safari to view the attached image, and I always have a set of wired headphones in my backpack. Sure it would be nice to have all of those and even sometime in the near future they all could be added, but they do not really bother me with the exception of copy and paste.
Another issue usually brought up is the battery life. I do have to charge my battery every night which can be a pain for some, but has become a habit for me. I also have an extra sync cable at work so I can charge there if I need to. From what I have read out of all the 3G phones the iPhone’s battery actually performs the best. This was driving one of my coworkers nuts since he was used to the old iPhone model. I showed him how to disable 3G and now his battery lasts as long as before, but he does not get the improved voice and data speed with 3G. It is a tradeoff up to the buyer.
Now on to the good stuff. The Apps! There are a lot of good free apps which I like. I was worried they were all going to cost an arm and a leg. I actually have only bought one app so far which was the ssh one I mentioned in the previous post. A lot of the apps work as a gateway to get to their respective web services. They make it a whole lot quicker than navigating to their webpage through Safari. Some of these include ebay, Facebook, Myspace, Paypal, and WordPress. There are of course many others to download, but those are the main ones that I have tried and used. All of them make it very easy to use there services.
A few of the other apps that I really like are Box Office which tells me the times of movies at all the local theatres and also includes their ratings from rottentomatoes.com, Netnewswire which has all my RSS feeds so I am kept up to date on all my news, and the built in mail app. I have the Mail app setup to check my mail for me every 15 minutes and it checks my gmail, uvu, uvlink, and work voicemail.
For fun stuff there is iPint which lets you drink a virtual beer, phonesaber for lightsaber battles, Labrynth, and mylite flashlight. These are all just little fun time wasters and are free.
For the actual phone part everything is pretty straight forward. The one thing that I really like is when I am on a call and another comes in there is actually a button that lets me hang up the current call and answer the incoming. This happens all the time when I am calling someone and they do not hear the phone, so I am about to leave a voicemail and they call me back at the same time. With my treo I could never remember the right procedure to do this, so I would have to either answer the call and have both going at the same time burning up twice the number of minutes or hang up both calls and then call the person back.
I am really liking the iPhone and would recommend it to anyone that can afford one and the plans. We have come a long way from the Handspring Visor Phone that I had back in the day. I would still recommend a Palm Treo or Centro for anyone that wants a cheaper phone and they do not require a data plan like the iPhone. Also, for the time being Palm OS still has a lot more programs out there. However, the IPhone is catching up and as of where the Apps are now I can do everything my Palm phone could do minus Nintendo emulation.
Below are a few screenshots from my phone.
First VNC and now finally an ssh client is now available for the iPhone. It is called TouchTerm and costs $2.99. This was one of the other apps I loved having on my Treo that I was hoping to make it to the iPhone. It does have a limitation right now that it does not have terminal emulation, so editing files with vi/emacs is out. However, the developer says it will be included in a update in the near future. There is also a pro version which will be discounted at first for users who buy this version and wish to upgrade. I’ll have to see what the features are since this one will probably be just fine for me once the terminal emulation feature is added. I plan to download it when I get home from work and I’ll post some screenshots.
The developors site is http://jbrink.net/touchterm/index.html
Today I finally found the background I wanted. I opted for a very light blue that is very subtle, but I really like how the pics are turning out. I am in the process of re-photographing my collection to replace the scans I did a few years ago on my site. These pics are looking much better than those. Also, it isn’t quite as a time consuming process as scanning each figure was. I’ve already finished all the figure released under the Star Wars logo.
