Touch Podium regulars, and new comers alike may have noticed a newly added sentence along the lines of “This websites has been put up for sale on so-and-so.” Well, I am happy to inform that I’ve had a change of heart, and Touch Podium is here to stay.

Not only am I NOT selling the website and all of its rights, but I am also starting to make posts on a much more frequent basis.

My 500 or so regulars will of noticed an incredible drop in postings within the last three or four months. The start of a new blog is to blame for this occurance. As much as I hate to inform, the iPod Touch and iPhone just don’t interest me personally as much as they used to a year ago. But this will not stop me from keeping Touch Podium updated on a bi-daily basis. That’s right. Touch Podium will be updated on a day, or bi-daily bases starting just recently.

A lot of hard work was put into starting this blog, and I just don’t have it in me to throw all of that away. Although the most recent addition to The Podium Network is taking up a lot of my spare time (that of which I have anyway), I will still make room for my first born; Touch Podium.

On another note, as unfortunate as it is, my business partner; Eric March, has decided that he would stop writing application reviews for Frapstr, meaning there will no longer be blog updates to The Free App Store Review (www.frapstr.com), another one of The Podium Network’s endeavors. To read more about the whole ordeal, have a look at the most recent (a.k.a. the last) post on Frapstr by Eric March himself.

For those whom have yet to have a peak at my most recent project, please do take a minute to check out Big Freakin’ News at www.bfn.im. I know, I know, “.im”, you say? “Doesn’t that stand for the Island of Maine?” Why yes, yes it does. But that didn’t stop me from getting a 5 character URL… and besides, .net and .com where already taken, as you would imagine. Feel free to let me know what you think by commenting any of the stories, or sending me an e-mail direct. One thing I’d like you to notice, is that I am hiring some staff, so if you’re at all interested, feel free to contact me about that. Yes, greedy plug, I know… Sorry, I couldn’t resist!

Cheers, my fellow readers.

Your Podium Network Founder,

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Alright, so it’s been a while since I’ve made a post in regards to the website itself, completely disregarding iPhone and iPod Touch talk from the subject, so I figured now would be a good time to do so.

Touch Podium, as most of the regulars should know by now, had really slowed down at the beginning of the 2009 year. Eric and I had begun to really slack off in terms of posts written per day, per week, per month…

I’d like to inform all of you that Eric March no longer writes for Touch Podium. Reason behind this tall tail is simply because he’s an extremely busy man, and now runs his own iPhone applications related blog; Frapstr. Frapster is a part of The Podium Network, and has been up and running now for quite a few months. Sometime late-last year, if I recall correctly. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I suggest you go on and take a peek. He’s running things well there, and I enjoy reading some of his posts every now and then, even though I don’t own an iPhone, or iPod Touch of any kind. (Yes, I’m serious.)

Now on to my side of the story. I’ve gone through a lot during these past few months. I’ve been in a bad accident, having to purchase a new vehicle. I’ve been through five or six jobs, many of which were night shifts. I am happy to report, however, that I am completely fed up of night shift jobs, and refuse to go back. I’ve gone through many 7-day work schedules, attempting to pay off bills and the likes. However, I’m happy to announce that I am currently only working 5 days a week, three of which are morning shifts, one of which is an afternoon shift, and one which is an evening shift. I’ve got Thursday’s and Saturday’s off, so expect those two days of the week to be the big-news days, if anything. This doesn’t mean I won’t be posting 4 or 5 stories on days that I do work though. Because ever since June 9th hit, I’ve been doing rather well when it comes to posting news on Touch Podium, if I do say so myself.

June 9th marked a new beginning for me. If you are one of my regular readers, you will have noticed that I had begun to write a lot, ever day or second-day since then. From January 2009 until May 2009, Touch Podium was only getting about 1 to 4 posts per month. Yes, that’s per month! Now that things are doing good for myself, I’m back up to 1 to 4 posts per day! The difference is unbelievable, but I will admit, I am astonished to be back, my friends.

Now, for site updates…

If you haven’t noticed already, I changed the advertisements around a little bit. Not that it matters to you regulars too much, as I’m sure you’ve mastered where they are by now! This was done, however, for those who find Touch Podium via search engines. Just thought I’d point it out.

Another new addition to the Touch Podium algorithm, is the Official Twitter and Facebook pages. Both of these social networking pages are updated using Touch Podium’s current RSS Feed, so you don’t have to worry about missing any news, if either of the social pages; Twitter and Facebook, is how you check up on Touch Podium news postings. The two pages are found at the very top of the left-most sidebar, at the top of every page.

Last but not least, the RSS Feed and E-mail Subscription links have been moved up, just below the “The Podium Network” watermark, found at the top of every page, to the right. Just above the search bar. This, I feel, will bring more people to subscribe to Touch Podium’s feeds, as they are more visible in this region, than they were in their previous region, which was at the top of the left-most sidebar (where the social networking websites are now posted).

Well, that’ll be all for now. Search engine viewers; thanks for stopping by. Touch Podium Regulars, always glad to have you. Thanks for keeping in touch. Always glad to hear from you all via story comments and the likes.

If there are any changes or additions that you think we could all gain from, please do not hesitate to leave a comment within this story.

Cheers!

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At the Apple press event today about the iPhone OS 3.0, the following capabilities/features were announced;

- In-App purchase to enable more app functionality

- peer to peer connectivity

- accessory connectivity

- Google map controls

- push notifications

- cut and paste

- landscape mode

- Messages (MMS)

- voice memos

- new Calendar support

- enhancements to the Stock App and search (Spotlight).

- Bluetooth A2DP stereo support

- Notes Sync

- audio/video tags

- Wi-Fi auto login

- iTunes account creation

- YouTube ratings

- Call Log

- Parental Controls

The new OS will ship “this summer” and will be completely free to iPhone 3G owners. iPod Touch owners will have to dish out $10 for the upgrade even though they will not be able to make use of all the functionality of the new OS…

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xWaves has released version 1.2 of their third party GPS software, xGPS, for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

This version includes audible turn-by-turn instructions, utilizes Google Maps or Google Terrain Maps and can be downloaded through Cydia via the MMI repository. This version is still a work in progress and isn’t without some bugs, but using this morning was easy, straight-forward and painless!

They have also released xGPS Manager which allows you to manage maps, GPS logs and more for the xGPS software. You can download maps for offline use and wirelessly transfer them to your iPhone or Touch instead of completing this process on the unit itself.

You may be asking yourself how this will work on the iPod Touch, as it does not have an integrated aGPS chip… Well, you can purchase a module through the xWaves website to add GPS fuctionality to your Touch.

More information on the features of this release can be found HERE.

If you were on the fence about jailbreaking your iPhone/Touch, this may be the final push you need to finally do it!

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Some of you may have noticed the downtime and the lovely “This account has been disabled” message when you tried to access TouchPodium, Frapstr or WebKit.  Turns out that a couple of databases had become a little screwed up and there were all kinds of queries left unclosed, which was hogging CPU time and screwing bloody well everything up.  It was causing massively slow queries which was chewing through CPU time like nobody’s business.  Apparently, SQL databases are prone to do that over time so every now and then I’ll have to monitor our databases and repair them as necessary.  Nevertheless, our host didn’t like all this CPU hogging business and put the entire account on suspension.

So I spent a good hour and a half on the phone with them getting everything straightened out — repairing the databases, primarily, but also they weren’t going to reenable our account until all version of WordPress we were running were upgraded to the latest version.  Oddly, the fact that our account was suspended was actually causing the upgrade not to work, so they reenabled our account so I could go ahead and upgrade — which I am currently in the process of doing.  And all of this is going on right in the middle of my own computer upgrade, which has unfortunately necessesitated my installing a fresh copy of Windows from scratch because I was unable to effect a repair install to recover my old installation.  I’ve barely got Windows 7 set up, so I’m doing all of this barebones in Internet Explorer (yecch!).

Anyway, Touch Podium is now running the latest WordPress, and I am about to upgrade Frapstr.  (Flog is okay because it’s already running 2.7.)  But if you were wondering what the hell was going on with the site, now you know.  We should be safe now; the account suspensions should cease and the databases are all fine.

We now return to your original blog already in progress.

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Today we have the excitement of celebrating an entire year in writing. Writing and posting about all things iPhone and iPod Touch related, that is. That’s right folks, Touch Podium is turning one year old today, and we’re very excited for an entirely new year of blogging!

On January 14th, 2008, Jody Mitoma (hey, that’s me!) started a blog he called iPod Touched, on the WordPress.com servers. At the time, I didn’t have the money to purchase my own hosting, and so I started small, just like I’m sure most of you other bloggers out there did. Not even a couple of weeks later, I found Eric (a.k.a. Mindfield), who is, to this day, a great friend and business partner. When we started off with iPod Touched, we didn’t know a thing about each other, whilst today, an entire year later, we’ve become friends, and even met one another!

Eric had the brilliant idea of changing the title of our blog to Touch Podium, which I must agree, sounds much better than iPod Touched. What was I thinking? Hehe.. Weeks after Eric’s addition to the blog, we moved our Touch Podium blog from the WordPress.com servers, onto our own purchased servers from BlueHost.com, at the same time, making the transition to WordPress.com.

Between the first couple of months in existence, we must of changed the Touch Podium layout at least five or six times, when we’ve finally decided to stick with the current layout that we’ve been running for at least half a year now.

From day one, to now, we’ll admit, we’ve also gone through a lot of writers/authors. I swear to you, I’m sure we’ve tried out at least seven or eight other writers, besides ourselves, but regret to inform, that none of them met up with what we were looking for.

As you can see from the post just below, Joseph Rossignol is our newest addition to the blog. Prior to Joseph being the newest writer, we also added Adam to the lineup just last week. I’d like to take a moment to quickly thank these two writers, whom by the way, live in the same province as Eric and I do, for joining us in our mission to bring the latest and greatest iPhone and iPod Touch news! So welcome aboard, and hope you enjoy the stay, you two!

Being it that Touch Podium turns one year old today, I’d like to throw out a few facts out there to all of you.

On January 6th, 2009, we’ve successfully managed to reach our 1,000,000th hit! Just eight days short of our one year in existence.

On September 28th, 2008, Eric decided to take his “The Free App Store Review” posts, which were at first being written right here on Touch Podium, and created an entirely new blog, which he named Frapstr. Frapstr has slowly, but surely been picking up on traffic, and is becoming more and more popular as each week passes. Be sure to go and check it out if you haven’t already.

Our last Touch Podium Report Card was posted on May 14th, 2008 (see here). After our fourth month of posting monthly statistics, we simply decided not to post the stats anymore, as it was irrelevant to our readers. But, reading the statistics of May 14th, and comparing them to today’s statistics, is quite interesting. Have a look for yourselves:

Blog Posts on May 14th: 686 | Today: 1,376 (including this post)
Total Site hits as of May 14th: 339,830 | Today: 1,019,972
RSS subscribers on May 14th: 264 | Today: 535
E-mail feed subscribers on May 14th: 40 | Today: 50 (this has gone nowhere)
Paid Affiliates prior to May 14th: 0 | Today: 2

Also, a few other interesting facts:

Today, we’ve made 5,025 tags since birth.
Today, we have 64 different categories.
Today, we’ve received a total of over 2,520 non-spam comments.

Anyway, I think that will be enough for facts.

On a completely different note, as most of you know, Eric and I are still working on our secret project, which we imagine should be completed sometime before April. We cannot say exactly what it is we’re working on, but I’m sure many of you will like what we’ve got in stock. What I can say, is that we’ve been working on this damn project for months now, and little by little, we get closer and closer to completion, but still, we’ve got a few months of production to go.

There will be a few sneak peeks at what we’ve got in the works in a month or so, but other than that, I cannot say any more.

Thank you, readers, for visiting Touch Podium, and bringing us where we are to this day. Without you, we wouldn’t be what we are today, and that, by the way, is within the top 225,000 websites on the entire Internet. Just to make a mental picture of where that puts us on a world-wide, or, should I say, Internet-wide scale… There are at least 5 billion websites on the Internet as of now. Being it that we are in the top 225,000, that puts us in the top 1% of all websites in existence.

Good evening, and good night!

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Hello All,

I just wanted to let everyone know about our upcoming product reviews.

As you can see further down in the posts on the main page, there is a review of the Otterbox Impact Series case for the 3G. You can read it here.

I apologize that I cannot review products for the iPod Touch 2G, but I do not currently have one in my possession.

Here is the list of upcoming product reviews (as of January 14, 2008);

1) Otterbox Defender Series case (iPod Touch 1G)

2) BatRest Stand (iPhone and iPod Touch)

3) Vaja i-volution top case (iPhone 3G)

4) Vaja i-volution grip case (iPod Touch 1G)

5) Richardsolo 1800 battery backup (iPhone and iPod family)

6) ifrogz Luxe case (iPhone 3G)

7) ifrogz Wrapz case (iPod 1G)

8) Contour Flick case (iPhone 3G)

9) Krusell Orbit case (iPhone 3G)

10) Krusell Orion case (iPod Touch 1G)

Keep checking back for additional products and giveaways!

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Enjoy the holidays!

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This also means I may have trouble posting new reviews and articles; if the server is unavailable I won’t be able to post until it comes back up.  I’ll still be able to queue up new articles to post when it does return though (have I mentioned that I love ScribeFire?) so I’ll still be able to write them, even if I’m not able to post them right away.

So if you are having trouble accessing the blog or notice that things are bit slow, this is why.  (Well, things being slow can also be a function of me working on our next project, which is still very much on the go and is still demanding on my time.)  Please be patient and try again in a little bit.  It’ll all be over soon enough, and then things will be far more stable.

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I’ve been focusing a lot of effort on Frapstr since its debut on September 30th.  (Technically the 29th, but it was late, and who’s counting anyway?)  Aside from the first week’s worth of site and DNS issues, I’ve also spent a fair bit of time tweaking, adding, removing, and generally improving Frapstr’s look ‘n feel so that it remains familiar to Touch Podium users but also caters more to the needs of its subject matter and generally makes things easier to navigate and is hopefully easy on the eyes.  I’ve spent a considerable amount of time trying to implement just the right combinations of things to achieve this goal, and although I don’t feel that I’m there yet, I think I’m getting closer.

Besides that though, the App Store itself has been fairly spilling over with new releases.  I have seen more new new releases (both premium and free) over the last week and a half than I have seen over the same period at any other time since the App Store opened.  (The first day notwithstanding.) I don’t know if it’s because there’s been a glut of new developers or whether a lot of existing developers just happened to release new titles and updates around the same time.  Probably a little from column A and a little from column B.  Either way, the App Store has become a veritable bustling metropolis over the past three and a half months,  and since it’s a one man blog, I can’t even hope to keep up with every new release at this pace.

Part of the reason for that — and this will only become even more evident and intrusive over the next little while — is the third thing: Our next project.  We like to play things close to the vest so I can’t say anything specific about it (though there’s a clue in here somewhere), but I can say that this is going to be our biggest endeavour yet, both Jody’s and mine, and it’s going to require a considerable amount of time, effort, and focus, and it’s going to take every resource we have to complete.

We already have more or less everything we need to do it (with one notable exception that is only partially taken care of), but right now we are taking that proverbial hardest-first-step — and we’re doing it with both feet.

Yes, this is the fourth addition to The Podium Network we’ve alluded to in the past (fifth if you count The Podium Network itself), though it’s probably not what you think (i.e. another blog to neglect).  All I can say is that it’s going to be most righteous and worth the wait and occasional (perhaps frequent) pains in the rump wondering where the hell we are and why we aren’t feeding our own blogs with a steady diet of fresh dish.

Yes, we do tend to bite off more than it seems like we can chew.  It builds character.  But we’re hungry, damnit, and while we know you are too, we’ve got gourmet fare of a different sort cooking.  Have patience, faith, valium, whatever you need.  You’ll see what we’re serving up soon enough.  Hopefully you’ll all like it.  Don’t worry, we fired that one rude waiter that said that thing about your mother and replaced him with an AI construct written in Objective C that totally fooled the Turing test judges into thinking it was a well-corned Scotsman with ADD.

I’m going to try and post a few things today though.  (Operative word: Try, as one never knows what my regular work day will bring.)

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So to my countrymen, enjoy the long weekend of gluttony, and to everyone else, we’ll slowly start getting back to normal around here once we’ve worked off our Thanksgiving weight, gotten everything sorted, I’m satisfied that Frapstr’s got its sea legs, and Jody finds some free time again.  For now, I’m off to stuff my face full of bird.

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Frapstr is now working 100% finally.  No more DNS issues or page errors, so you are free to visit and move about as normal.  I still have a few minor things to take care of, but they are mostly behind the scenes and won’t adversely effect anything.

Android Podium still has one serious issue that we are trying to nail down.  Any attempts to go to http://www.androidpodium.com or http://android.touchpodium.com will redirect you here.  For now, keep using http://www.touchpodium.com/android until we can get that fixed.

We apologise for the inconvenience these last few days as we monkeyed and fiddled and futzed with the site, but we’re getting things sorted out slowly but surely.  We appreciate your patience as we expand The Great and Meaty Podium Empire.

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As of right now, http://www.thepodiumnetwork.com has worked from the beginning somehow, and I just managed to get http://www.frapstr.com fixed up properly, but http://www.androidpodium.com continues to be an issue — I can access it through IE fine, but not FireFox, though this may be my browser’s cache.

If you are experiencing any lingering issues connecting to any of our sister sites, please use the following URLs in order of preference:

Android Podium: http://www.androidpodium.com, http://androidpodium.com, http://www.touchpodium.com/android/

Frapstr: http://www.frapstr.com, http://frapstr.com, http://frapstr.touchpodium.com

We apologize for the inconvenience. Hopefully this should all resolve itself shortly.

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Anyway, enough about me! Off to the goodies.

Just yesterday, The Podium Network revealed its second project; The Free App Store Review, or Frapstr. Eric will be writing for Frapstr as often as possible, bringing you the most up-to-date reviews on free applications that are worthy of being reviewed. He’ll even review the crappy apps, just to make things a little more fun, so go on and have a look, and don’t forget to vote using our rating system. Of course, leave comments and we’ll get back to you, just like we do here at Touch Podium.

Tonight I’m introducing the third project The Podium Network exposes.

The project title is!…

( Click here to visit Android Podium now )

There you have it ladies and gentlemen! Android Podium! Yes, Android as in Google’s Android. Now, before all of y’all Apple fan boys go nuts, I never once said The Podium Network would be solely based on the iPhone and iPod touch, let alone on all Apple products. And yes, I know that Google’s Android platform is competing against Apple’s iPhone lineup, but I honestly don’t care. I’m personally not a fanboy of any sort, and fully support all companies that know what they’re producing. Google’s Android platform is going places, and that is why Android Podium is here.

With all honesty, Eric and I have had Android Podium planned out since March, but simply never had the time to get the website up and running. Now, finally, here it is, in much better shape than what we would of brought to the table 6 months ago.

There is no news posted on Android Podium yet, but I plan to post a few stories tomorrow after work, which will be at around 8pm EST.

If you’ve got any suggestions to make Android Podium a better place, don’t hesitate to drop us a line at tips@touchpodium.com, or better yet, simply leave a comment here and we’ll get back to you that way.

Alright, and now for something different…

As you would of already read if you pay any attention to post titles, I managed to get The Podium Network’s website up and running… kinda. It’s not fully functional yet, but at least the main interface is up so that y’all can have a sneak peek. The links that are not crossed over with a red x are in fact clickable, while the links with red x’s crossing over are obviously not.

( Click here to visit The Podium Network now )

So as of yesterday, The Podium Network has three projects in alliance with itself, bringing the total number of projects and sole URL’s to four; Touch Podium (‘www.touchpodium.com‘), Frapstr (‘www.frapstr.com‘), Android Podium (‘www.androidpodium.com‘), and The Podium Network (‘www.thepodiumnetwork.com‘).

NOTICE: Keep in mind frapstr.com, androidpodium.com, and thepodiumnetwork.com were all purchased less than 24 hours ago, meaning the websites may not be accessible to all visitors around the world for the next day or two. All four URL’s should be fully functional by Thursday evening at the very latest, most likely sooner.

Have a great night everyone.

The Podium Network Founder,
Jody Mitoma

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I write to you all again this evening to share some exciting news. Eric and I have been hard at work on releasing our The Free App Store Review (a.k.a Frapstr) blog, cleaning things up on the Touch Podium blog, and at the same time, raising the bar for our (or should I say Eric’s) app store reviews. Keep up the great work, Eric! Also, as Eric has already announced yesterday evening, Frapstr will be getting its own domain name and URL, which will make it easier to remember, and give it a more professional feel.

Frapstr aside, I’d like to announce this evening that I will most likely be revealing our third project in the making. First it was Touch Podium, then it was Frapstr, and then came…… hey wait a minute, I’m not quite ready to announce just yet. All I can say as of now is that it is another full-blown blog like Touch Podium, but has nothing to do with Apple’s iPhone and/or iPod touch.

Once the third project has been announced and revealed, Eric and I will be spending great amounts of time on our fourth project in the making. Yes, a fourth project already. We’re keeping busy! There is one thing I will say about our fourth project, and that is that it’ll take a hell of a long time to finish up. Don’t expect any announcements about the project until around Christmas time. That’s still two months away from now. Don’t worry, we’ll be sure to make it worth the wait.;)

New projects aside, I’d like to point out that I’ve been busy making a few changes here at Touch Podium as well. Touch Podium is our “baby”, after all. It’s were it all started. October 14th will mark the nine-month anniversary of Touch Podium’s establishment, and I won’t lie, that 3/4’s of a year just flew by in absolutely no time. Touch Podium has undergone an astonishing amount of changes since it’s debut on January 14th, and we’ll keep on making changes as long as it gives you, our viewers, a better reading experience.

One of the added functions to Touch Podium is the addition of a “Featured” articles category. The Featured category will display a small blue image that reads “FEATURED”, so that it is easier to pin-point from the crowed of stories. To go with the new “Featured” category, I’ve taken the time to add a sidebar widget, which displays the 10 latest Featured stories posted on Touch Podium for easy access.

Another thing I added this evening is the very top bar you see on every page on Touch Podium. This makes it easier to access all of the websites from within The Podium Network, at the click of a mouse, including The Podium Network website itself.

Like usual, I’d appreciate any and all suggestions that’ll make Touch Podium, The Free App Store Review, and The Podium Network as a whole, better for you, our readers. We do this for you, so of course your opinion matters the most.

Update:
A HUGE thanks goes out to Jack for purchasing www.frapstr.com for us, and having the original website redirect to the purchased URL. We couldn’t thank you enough for doing this for us.

Update 2:
Unfortunately, in fear of having the URL bought before we are ready to purchase it (not because of you, Jack. We’re just going to be careful with this one because it is more generic), I won’t be able to reveal The Podium Network’s third project this evening. The announcement will have to wait about a week longer, even though the website is near-completion status. My apologies in advance, readers.

Thanks for reading, and best regards to you all.

Your Touch Podium Founder,
Jody Mitoma

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Alright, enough teasing.  Although I’m not entirely done with it yet, I’ve decided to pull off the wraps and give up the big reveal.

Yes, those of you who have been wondering, perhaps even anticipating the Big Mystery over the last couple of days need wonder no more — though perhaps some of you have already guessed by the teaser I posted yesterday.

You see, Frapstr’s a man, now, with all of the rights and responsibilities that entails, and that means that, as a responsible parent, it behooved me to kick it out of the house and get it standing on its own two feet.  Of course, I couldn’t do that without at least giving it a place to live, so that is exactly what I’ve done.

The domain name for it isn’t ready yet, so right now, http://frapstr.touchpodium.com http://www.frapstr.com will get you to the proper place.

As for the site itself, Frapstr has grown to the point where a simple weekly article just isn’t enough to contain it anymore.  With the new site I can expand on the concept, offering individual articles to each release, posting releases as they occur instead of waiting to collect them into one weekly compilation, adding user ratings, category filters, better search capabilities, more targeted feature articles, and I get to monkey with the CSS to make it look just so.

There are still some changes and additions to be made over the next short while, mostly behind the scenes, and the new dedicated URL should be live no later than the end of next week, but for right now it’s good enough to let y’all in for a housewarming party so you can check out Frapstr’s new digs.

Head on over to http://www.frapstr.com (don’t get comfy with that URL though) and check out the first addition to The Podium Network!  (Which I suppose makes it a proper network now)  And in case it’s scrolled down too far by the time you get this, don’t forget to check out the welcome message, too.

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Not even Crispin Glover knows.

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Fellow Touch Podium readers,

I write today to inform why Eric and I haven’t been posting as often lately – also to explain why these next couple of days will also be a bit slow as well.

Eric and I are both working men whom both hold full-time employment, aside from Touch Podium. We do not have every minute of every day to work on Touch Podium. This is one of the main reasons I, personally, haven’t been posting as much as of late – however this will change. I recently quit a night-shift job that I had been working, which had been messing with my schedule of life. I was working from 1am to as late as 6am at times. But like I said, this job is no more, thus I will be contributing in posting more often as of late. And that’s without mention of our social lives. We’re human beings, just like yourself, and so we go out and enjoy ourselves, too. Our lives aren’t spent in front of the computer 24/7, although, I will admit, a helluva lot of my time is – and so is Eric’s!

Another reason we haven’t been postin’ news as of late, which complies for both Eric and I, is because we are working on other projects together. What projects, you ask? I’m afraid I can’t say, just yet. We’ve got multiple things on the go right now. Once these projects are up and running, we’ll have more time to post more stories on Touch Podium, bringing you the latest news, as soon as it hits the wires.

Eric and I met through iPod Touch Fans (.com) in January of this year. Since then, we’ve grown to become great friends, let alone partners in crime. Touch Podium is only one of our many projects on the go — but we aren’t spilling the beans as to what projects it is that we are working on. You will just have to wait and find out.

One thing’s for sure — one project is just around the corner, about ready for announcement, and will be going live as soon as the next couple of days. Oh, and yes, this project does have something to do with Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch devices.

Also, as I’m sure most of you have already noticed, Eric and I started a network; The Podium Network. The network was started to incorporate all of our work, keeping things cleaner and more professional as a whole. Like I mentioned above, Eric and I have a few projects (yes, more than one) in the works, and we’ve got several others we’d like to get started on once these first few are up and running. The Podium Network will consist of several (5+) projects (websites and other things, which I cannot say).

Now it’s off to bed I go. It’s 3 o’clock in the morning, and I’ve got work at 11am. Arrrgh!

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Well hell, this looks bloody cool. I thought Flying Rider looked freakishly amazingly, but this.. WOW. You have both the pencil and line tool, in three colours: blue, red and green; nifty! You’re always handy eraser, undo, hand and zoom but you can also flag (save Bosh’s (the rider guy) position), save, load and delete tracks! Looks like they’ve pushed a lot in this initial release. Hopefully in the coming future inXile can push an update with more capabilities, as we all know the iPhone and Touch can hand a ton more than what it’s currently being thrown at.

(Direct iTunes Link for Line Rider iRide)

(Stay tuned for a review in the future @ Touch Podium)

(Via FingerGaming)

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We had some great submissions to the Snapture screenshot contest, and the folks over at Snapture Labs had a heck of a time picking out winners.  In the end though, there can be only one three, and we’ve got those three for you right here.

Congratulations are in order to our winners (click images to enlarge):

Jen T.	Aaron Robassa	Matthew Batey

These winning entries have earned them a free upgrade to Snapture Premium!  Winners, check your E-Mail for further instructions, and we hope you’ll enjoy the cool new features.

You can still view all entries in the contest gallery.

Once again, kudos to our winners and also props to Snapture Labs for fronting the goodies.  Hopefully it won’t be too long before we see y’all with another cool contest featuring fabulous prizes.

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Before last night, the page only had up to firmware 1.1.4 available. If you are ever looking for a certain firmware version, your easiest bet would be to check out the Firmware Comparison page, as we’ve got firmware versions ranging from iPhone’s firmware 1.0, all the way up to 2.0.2, with fourteen additional firmware versions ranging in between the two.

Check out our Firmware Comparison page here.

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The above image is a bit of a treat. It’s an image of Touch Podium in its early stages. Very early stages. Oh, how we’ve grown since January.

Now, as you’ve probably already noticed, we’ve made a few minor changes to the site.

First off, the entire header has been revamped.

I’ve gone and removed the top navigation bar which was previously found just below the header image. The links previously found within the navigation bar are now found on the left-most sidebar, at the very top. (Don’t forget to check out our Snapture Screenshot Contest found in red, bold text!)

I’ve also touched up the main header image, gave it a soft shadow, thickened the text a tad, and darkened the circle around the tittle (the dot on the letter “i”) (which is meant to look like the iPhone/iPod Touch “Home” button), and gave the website a more basic catch line. Straight to the point.

In replacement of the top navigation bar, I went and gave the very top of the website a bit of a shade, making it stand out a little bit more than the rest of the website.

I’ve also removed the links from the very bottom of the website layout, as they were not being used enough to have them there in the first place. The links were simply duplicates as to what could be found at the top of the website anyway.

While in the process of cleaning up, I’ve removed a couple pages as well. One of the pages being the videorials page, as it was not receiving enough hits from our viewers, and the other page being the Product Support page. I feel it’ll take far too long to fill that page up with the contact information of hundreds of companies, and would not be used enough to be of much use, thus I vanquished it entirely. I hope no one minds.

While we’re in the midst of making some changes, why not give us your opinion on what we could do to make Touch Podium better for you. We’d love to hear what you’ve got for suggestions, and will take any and all of them into consideration.

Thanks readers, for always coming back. It feels like just yesterday we reached our 600,000th hit, and already today we’ve hit our 650,000th.

Now, back to the news.

Update:

After fiddling around with new background ideas for more than an hour, I’ve finally come to a decision with the background you see around this very post. Subtle grain, diagonal lines, and faded effects, just as the last background had, but with an upgraded effect.

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Going to the same URL you’ve always known and loved on your iPhone or iPod Touch will automatically bring you to the mobile verison of our site, which features much more lightweight pages in a condensed form suitable for display on your beloved device. It scales to portrait or landscape mode, and features search capabilities and a dropdown menu to access other mobile-friendly areas of our site.

It isn’t perfect yet; we’re using a wordpress plugin called WPTouch, which I have modified slightly to suit our style a bit more, and currently it doesn’t seem to support scaling of article images to a more mobile-friendly format, thus some of the article images appearing in the full article and on full pages will extend off the page. Still, it’s a far cry from the full version of our site, which is graphics-heavy and can take a long time to load, to say nothing of data consumption over EDGE and 3G networks. Now you can visit your favourite iPhone and iPod Touch blog in a slim, compact, quick-loading flavour!

As this is new for us and I am still exploring its capabilities, things may yet change on our mobile site, but for now it is suitable for live presentation, so if you’ve been avoiding us on the go because it just takes too damn long or eats too much bandwidth, feel free to take another look! Any suggestion or comments are appreciated and will be taken into full consideration.

And now back to your regularly scheduled blog already in progress.

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We love the iPhone and iPod Touch community. I mean, we must, given how much time spend yacking about them, gushing over new software and accessories, and yes, even being snarky over the crap stuff. (We snipe because we love.) Sometimes we get the opportunity to help out with stuff we like, and that’s cool, because it makes us feel like we’re making a positive contribution to the community beyond just passing on information.

So it is with pleasure that we would like to announce that we’ve set aside some server space so that we could host iWebKit. You may recall my article about it a couple of days ago, wherein I examined the package and pronounced it good. The article took me a little longer to write than I wanted because I couldn’t gain access to his site due to his hosting with 110mb.com. We’ve been there, we know the problems with 110mb.com. It’s probably fine for hosting small sites, but for relatively large blogs like ours or sites that host cool packages for iPhone and iPod Touch, it just wasn’t good enough. Recognizing this, we offered to host iWebKit, and the results are that it now has its own domain and reliable hosting. You can find a permanent link to the site on the sidebar to your right under “Hosted Sites.”

Welcome aboard, iWebKit! Here’s to continued success and a proliferation of mobile-friendly websites.

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Please excuse the mess of advertisements around here as of late.

Eric and I are in the means of fixing this place up, and will be removing a good portion of the advertisements you see up today.

We’re in the process of figuring out what advertisements will be best for Touch Podium, without getting too cluttered.

The process should last no longer than a week. That’s a promise.

Hope you all had a great weekend.

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