Touching up X: iToday, Time Capsule, vWallpaper, Hahlo 3…

Posted by Eric March on May 13, 2008 at 2:07 am

I’m falling behind, folks, and I apologize. Real life sometimes tends to intrude in ways not entirely conducive to tending to my blogging responsibilities. Or sleep. But I plug away where I can. I’m going to play a little catch-up here, so forgive me if some of these have a bit of a stale aroma. I’m also going to forego the screenies this time around, just for the sake of expediency. But look on the bright side. You’ll still get the brilliant, witty, and sometimes biting wit I’m famous for. Or maybe that’s just biting.

Anyway, today, I’m going to be covering the release of iToday, updates to PuzzleManiak, vWallpaper, and Ringtones, plus news on Hahlo 3, TapNumber, iPlot, “Linux Installer”, Firmware 2.0’s chinese support, Moody, and WeLyrics.

iToday Beta Released
Skrew have finally released iToday. Today. Um… yeah. Anyway, iToday upgrades the usual battery meter/lock screen background to give it something a little more useful — namely, missed calls/SMS messages, weather, birthday reminders, your next three appointments, and so on. It even supports vWallpaper backgrounds. (This is automatic, in fact; you can’t disable the backgrounds) This is something I’ve been waiting for, given that I didn’t really want to shell out the big bucks for Caterpillar Kate only for a couple of features that I’d find useful. Now, for this part at least, I don’t have to. It’s currently in beta, but works quite well, though it’s a tad messy. Still, it almost seems like a little bit of my old Windows Mobile Today screen on my iPhone. You can grab it from the Skrew source (http://i.danstaface.net)
(via iPod Touch Fans)

vWallpaper 0.8
While we’re on the subject of Skrew, there’s an update to vWallpaper to 0.8 that provides the ability to delete wallpaper on-board. They’ve also added a few more downloadable wallpapers, but have yet to fix the autlock problem.
(via Apple iPhone School)

Ringtones 2.87
Continuing on with all the news that’s fit to Skrew, Ringtones has had an update as well. Not much new here; a fixed link to the news page, a bug fix, and a change to the location of the ringtones, which will now be found in /private/var/mobile/Media/Skrew/. You know where to find it.

TapNumber 1.0.0
From Sonoran Blue comes a simple little reflex/identification game called TapNumber. The object couldn’t be simpler: Tap the numbers in sequence starting with 1 as quickly as you can. The catch is that the numbers are scrambled, so you have to find them before you can tap them. You can figure the size of the grid, from a laughable 2×2 to a ridiculously hard 10×10. (Hard both in the fact that there are 100 numbers to tap, and because the spots you need to tap are so tiny that the average meaty digit needs some pretty good accuracy to avoid a miss.) Grab it from the iSpazio source (http://repo.ispazio.net)

iPlot 0.5.2
Like plotting mathematical functions on graphing calculators? Good. At least one of us does, so you’ll probably like iPlot. In the spirit of the classic HP graphing calculators, iPlot lets you graph mathematical functions. Find roots, minimums, maximums, integrals and derivates of functions. I won’t even pretend to know what the hell any of that means. Did I mention I sucked at math? Good, then I won’t have to repeat myself. You can plot up to 20 functions, and all of the elementary functions are present, as well as a few rare ones. It allows you to pan, zoom, and set graph limits manually. You can grab this one from the Big Boss repo (http://thebigboss.org/repo.xml)
(via iPod Touch Fans)

Hahlo 3: Released Edition
For you twitterheads who have been breathlessly anticipating the day Hahlo 3 goes live, your payoff is here, as Hahlo 3 is officially online. Not much more to say about it that we haven’t already said, really, so go tweet or something.
(via TUAW)

PuzzleManiak 0.95 Released
Fans of this impressive collection of logic and puzzle games have probably already noticed that there’s been a new version released. 0.95 now adds a random game feature in case you just can’t choose because they’re all equally good, as well as squashes a few more bugs. It will also save your last game if you have to jump back to springboard or answer a call. In case you don’t have this wonderful app full o’ games, you can grab it on the ModMyiFone repo (http://modmyifone.com/installer.xml)
(via Installer Apps)

Linux “Installer”
Based on the principle that there’s always one idiot in every group who will believe anything, DavTeam have released a Linux “Installer.” In case my sarcasm wasn’t direct enough, this does not install Linux. It pretends to install Linux. I suppose you might find some interest in this if you’re the sort of person who’s so easily amused that you fixate on your washing machine just because you don’t want to miss the climactic spin cycle. In that case, you can grab it from their repo (http://davteam.com/repo.xml). For everyone else, you might want to seek your mindless entertainment elsewhere. Like watching Barack Obama do stand-up.
(via Apple iPhone School)

Firmware 2.0 Gets Chinese Handwriting Support
Now this is pretty cool. Turns out that Firmware 2.0 is going to get Chinese handwriting support. And I don’t mean a keyboard. Instead, you’ll get a virtual data input area (DIA) much like Palm devices where you can draw Chinese symbols (both traditional and simplified). The symbols will be recognized and turned into proper on-screen characters. As far as I know this is the first time this has ever been done on a mobile device, so props to Apple for this one.
(via Engadget)

Moody 1.0 Released
Here’s an interesting concept — at least for Mac users. Crayon Factory’s Moody is a different sort of approach to creating a virual iTunes playlist. While iTunes will let you create playlists based on artist, album, genre, or a host of other criteria, it isn’t the most ideally suited to building playlists based on particular moods. You could manually create them, sure, but then you’d have to sort all new additions by hand. Moody is a way to create dynamic “virtual” playlists that have the ability to play songs that fit a particular mood. Simply tag songs with the mood — happy, sad, calm, intense, etc. — and they will be assigned to a relevant colour-coded box within the Moody window. Once you’ve tagged your songs (or as many as you can stand) just click on one of the coloured buttons that represent mood and it will hook into iTunes to play all songs tagged with that mood. The mood tags are stored in the composer field, though, so if you’re the sort of person who keeps meticulously groomed tags containing every piece of information you can mister, then you might want to give this one a pass. Given that most people don’t even bother with tags (and really, people — tags are your friend! Smart playlists, man!) this probably won’t be a problem for many. Moody is donationware, and you can set your own price, though the author helpfully suggests $9. MacOS 10.4 or greater is required.
(via TUAW)

WeLyrics Released
For you lyric hounds who would love lyrics while your songs are playing, this is definitely the app for you. weiPhone’s WeLyrics will download and display lyrics to the currently-playing song in the Music/iPod app whenever you tap on the album art. It will scroll through them as the song plays, though not in time with the song. (This ain’t Karaoke) It works quite well, too! I can’t verify the veracity of the lyrics it grabs because I don’t know where it fetches them from, but if it’s like 99.9% of the sites out there where you can find lyrics, I wouldn’t bank on them being 100% accurate. All the same, it’s better than nothing. You can grab this from the weiPhone source (http://app.weiphone.com/installer)
(via Apple iPhone School)

Alright, there we go. Another episode in the can. Stay tuned, ‘cos there’s more coming up very shortly. Much more. Really — I’m sitting on a mountain of news. (Don’t worry. I put it through the wash before I post it.)

Posted in Application Related, Gaming Related, Touching Up, Web Apps, iPhone 2.0