Google Wave iPhone App

Google Wave has been making headlines in the tech world. Not many people know this since not everyone received the official invite yet but it already works in the iPhone. It looks quite fantastic.  You can simply go to wave.google.com in mobile Safari on your iPhone and wil be prompted that you are using a browser not supported during the preview, however, once you click through, it actually works well.

You can save a bookmark on your Home screen and it creates a little icon like other Web pages on the iPhone. However, Google Wave is a bit different. Once you launch it it removes the Safari wrapper which allows you to nagivate to another page or search the Web. It actually looks like a regular native iPhone app.

The screen shot on the right is what Google Wave looks like on the iPhone launched from the Home screen bookmark. The screen shot at the bottom is what it looks like from within Safari.

Via TechCrunch

iPhone Visual Voicemail Notification Fix

One of the most frustrating and surprisingly under reported issues is with AT&T and iPhone Visual Voicemail notifications. When you receive a voicemail on your iPhone, an alert appears and you can play your voicemail as if its a song. There is now a solution!

Since the iPhone 3GS was released, some customers experienced lack of alerts for voicemail (me being one of them). I recently found a fix for it while I was researching tethering for 3GS. Apparently, tethering your iPhone may cause this issue.

So here’s the fix. Navigate to Settings → General → Network → Cellular Data Network and within the Visual Voicemail section add “acds.voicemail” into the APN field. Your visual voicemail will now work once again.

CAUTION: This fix does break the tethering. You can’t have voicemail notifications and Internet tethering work at the same time.

Via Apple Blog

Steve Ballmer grabs Apple iPhone from Microsoft employee and ‘stomps’ it into ground

Microsoft is having a tough time these days with its image. Google forced Microsoft to to launch the free vaporware Office Online to compete with Google Docs. The Zune player which was meant to compete with the iPod is a dud. The Zune’s slogan “Welcome to the Social” has got to be one of the worst in history. You kind of need a crowd to market with that slogan first don’t you think?  Let’s not even talk about the horrible name of Zune itself.

Now it looks like Microsoft has another publicity stunt they have to dampen.  Microsoft Steve Ballmer, at a conference to showcase Bing 2.0 and a new Windows 7 commercial, saw an employee take pictures with his iPhone. He then grabbed the iPhone, threw it to the ground, and pretend to stomp on it after much booing from the audience.

The good news is that no one threw eggs at Ballmer this time. If Ballmer spent the same energy trashing the iPhone, Microsoft might have some relevancy left in the mobile market. Otherwise, Ballmer should just c:\>format himself

Via TechFlash

Because I’m sometimes a total idiot, I decided to upgrade my jailbroken iPhone 3G to OS 3.1 last night, despite all warnings from the Dev Team to NOT do this until they’d had a chance to check out the 3.1 firmware.  Because I have an almost child-like faith in the ability of the interwebs to find a workaround to jailbreak the iPhone, I figured I’d be out of sorts for no longer than a month or two before I got back to my jailbroken goodness.  And who knows, I may still be saved from my own stupidity.  However as of this point, my iPhone is officially borked.

So here’s the background.  Following the lead of our fearless leader Quang, I jailbroke my phone using the easy-as-cake redsn0w tool about two months ago.  And life was good, though not super-wonderful.  The main point of my jailbreak was to get access to deep customization and themes, plus a couple of apps that Apple refused to allow in the Apps Store (GVMobile and the uTorrent monitoring app).  I really didn’t need background apps or tethering, so a lot of the real benefit of jailbreaking was lost on me.  Still, I’d grown pretty accustomed to being able to change the look and feel of my device on a whim.  And I got kind of obsessive about monitoring the free memory of my iPhone.

When OS3.1 came out, a lot of the features it contained (Genius mixes and apps organization specifically) were things I wanted to play with so I figured I’d upgrade, try it out, and return to jailbroken freedom in due time.  Well the upgrade went fine (btw, jailbroken iPhones will sync just fine with iTunes 9), but now my iPhone does not display all the apps I’ve installed on it.  I believe that this is due to my use of a jailbroken app called Categories, which allows you to create folders into which to place your apps.  I think that the linkage between Springboard and Categories (which hides the app once it’s been placed in a folder) still exists and that the iPhone thinks the apps are installed but that Springboard has them set to hide because that’s what Categories told it to do.  I only noticed this issue this morning so I’ve tried a hard reboot to see if that would fix the problem.  No dice.  I’ll have to wait until I get home to do a full restore, and then if that doesn’t work I’m going to try to remove all my apps and re-add them to the iPhone and see if that does the trick.  If not, then I’m well and truly hosed and I might have to return to factory defaults as a last resort.

So word of advice – don’t upgrade your jailbroken iPhone until the Dev Team gives the all clear!

Twitscoop iPhone App

Have you ever wondered what people are talking about in the cyberspace cloud in real time? Well, now you can with the iPhone App Twitscoop.

Twitscoop allows visualization of real time trends and discussions on Twitter straight from your iPhone. The tag cloud grows and shrinks in real-time depending on the popularity of the topic.  The app has a trend algorithm that pulls buzz words, breaking news, and content such as pictures, links, and videos.

Strangely, the key feature lacking in Twitscoop is the lack of ability to tweet from within the app. It is such an obvious feature that they should include it in future updates.

Twitscoop is available for $0.99 on the iTunes App Store.

GPush Gmail Push Notifications

There is finally a simple iPhone app to allow Gmail push notifications. Can’t wait every 15 minutes for your iPhone to automatically check your email? This app is for you and the reviews have been pretty good. Push notifications allow you to receive a new email rather than having your mail application check (or pull) for new email. Simply turn on the app, enter your Gmail username and password (running over encrypted SSL) and you can get push notifications with From and Subject fields. It supports a variety of alerts such as sounds, badge, or vibrate.

A neat trick is to setup Google Calender notifications to push to a different email that you setup on GPush. You will still get alerts but they won’t come into your main inbox. This reduces SMS alerts which costs you less money as well. Every now and then you will just have to push your email for “junk” or notifications.

It only costs $1 at the App Store and may go up to $2 eventually.

Facebook 3.0 iPhone App

Facebook App v 3.0 is in the approval process for the App Store. Already Joe Hewitt (app developer) is working on v 3.1. Here is the a screen shot of the new version the Facebook app.

It looks like the this version comes with much needed improvements most notably video uploads with the iPhone 3GS. It will also come with a better News feed much like the Facebook site with the ability to “like” items.

Apple shouldn’t have a problem approving this app since there isn’t really much that AT&T would object to that would compete with their business. Version 3.1 is expected to support push notifications as a lot of users are hoping Facebook will become the unified communication platform.