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Don’t worry, it’s the same stupid crap that you’ve come to expect from us, we just moved to our new hosting site. You can see all your favorite iPhone BS now right here.

Visit us at IronInkMedia.com

DIRECTV app now available

DIRECTV has come out with a great new app that allows you to program your DVR right from your iPhone. With the free app, you can:

– Search for any television show up to 14 days in advance
– Browse programs by channel or date & time
– Get program information instantly, including description, length and rating
– Record a single episode or an entire series
– Program Pay Per View movies to be recorded and ready to watch anytime
– Record to any DIRECTV DVR in your home

When is Time Warner going to get an app like this??

Leprechauns hit hard by recession

Even though it was just St. Patty’s Day, leprechauns have nothing to dance around about. They too are feeling the affects of the recession: No more gold at the end of the rainbow. Jason Erdkamp broke the story after taking this shot with his iPhone.

iPhoto by Jason Erdkamp

Your flowing blood can power your iPhone?

Foxnews.com actually has some information that’s worth a damn! No, no, hear me out. They cite actual research this time that says that there is a way to convert human blood flow into actual energy that could power your iPhone. They say:

Researchers reported today they can harvest energy by converting low-frequency vibrations, like simple body movements, the beating of the heart or movement of the wind, into electricity by using zinc oxide nanowires that conduct the electricity.

The nanowires are piezoelectric — they generate an electric current when subjected to mechanical stress.

Other schemes have been devised to generate power in a backpack as you hike or from a device attached to the knee. Those are comparatively bulky, however.

Nano devices are tiny. The diameter and length of the wires used in the new technique are 1/5,000th and 1/25th the diameter of a human hair.

“This research will have a major impact on defense technology, environmental monitoring, biomedical sciences and even personal electronics,” said lead researcher Zhong Lin Wang, Regents’ Professor, School of Material Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

OS 3.0 will be speedy

Our good pals at TheiPhoneBlog.com (they have no idea who we are) tipped us off on some stats regarding the Safari speed of OS 3.0. And it seems that iPhone users can look forward to finding out who led the 2001 NCAA Tournament in scoring much faster than you can with OS 2.2.1. This means the idiot at the end of the bar will be squashed and embarrassed much quicker than he would have been previously.

Because as we all know, pounding your fists and yelling above the jukebox does not make Juan Dixon the top scorer of that tourney.

So anyway, here are the stats:

App refund clause nothing new

TechCrunch, and others, reported yesterday that Apple’s new iPhone 3.0 SDK agreement could bankrupt developers. Apple’s contract states:

In the event that Apple receives any notice or claim from any end-user that: (i) the end-user wishes to cancel its license to any of the Licensed Applications within ninety (90) days of the date of download of that Licensed Application by that end-user; or (ii) a Licensed Application fails to conform to Your specifications or Your product warranty or the requirements of any applicable law, Apple may refund to the end-user the full amount of the price paid by the end-user for that Licensed Application.

In the event that Apple refunds any such price to an end-user, You shall reimburse, or grant Apple a credit for, an amount equal to the price for that Licensed Application. Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the end.

But today, CNET says it’s “much ado about nothing.” The article is pretty lengthy, but in a nutshell:

The clause has always been in the contract. And even if someone wants a refund, it’s not easy to get. Apple will most likely replace apps that have technical problems. If you really want a refund, you will have to file something legal. You can’t complain that an app didn’t live up to your expectations.

Apple has granted some refunds although it’s a very, very small number. And the money the developer loses goes towards paying the processing transaction fees.

New Light Writer app

From our good friends at Laan Labs (they have no idea who we are) comes a new iPhone app called “Light Writer – POV Effect.” You write a message or get a piece of clipart and then wave your arm around to create “magic.” Ok, so we aren’t entirely sure how this works, but we are curious to check it out. We easily stole from Gizmodo secretly obtained some images.

No more Bluetooth for iPhone?

Thanks to our good friends at AppleInsider.com (they have no idea who we are), we found out that it appears that Apple will be discontinuing their Bluetooth headset. A couple of our their astute readers pointed it out to us them.

Check out the picture:

MovieWedge: the glorified bean bag

On Twitter today (are you on? follow me @Lindsey651) I saw someone giving away a MovieWedge “iPhone stand.” I have never had the need for a stand, but I also don’t watch movies on the iPhone. And when watching YouTube clips I am able to muster the strength to hold the phone on my own. Still, being curious I checked it out.

I headed over to the MovieWedge website and quickly realized it’s a beanbag. Just a beanbag with a $9.95 price tag. It doesn’t even come in any fancy colors or patterns. Hell, I made these things at sleep-away camp when I was a kid. For less work, you can head over to your local dollar store. Go crazy, buy two.

Maybe this company will sell a ton and can laugh at me all the way to the bank. But Inked Up is giving MovieWedge our special seal of “Worthless iPhone Accessory.”

Let the Madness begin

Today begins March Madness, one of my favorite times of year. I don’t watch much (any) college basketball during the regular season, but when the bracket comes out I am hooked. This is due in large part to the fact that I won a pool my first year by picking entirely on name association. If you’re like me and want to know who is playing at all times, the iPhone has some great options this year.

The CBS March Madness on Demand app lets you watch all of the tourney games live by streaming video on your iPhone. The app costs only $5 but you will need a Wi-Fi connection.

CBS Sports looks OK on the iPhone, but their NCAA section leaves something to be desired. It loads like the regular website and takes a lot of scrolling and resizing to get around. A much better option is the ESPN mobile website at espn.com.

But the best place to get your stats seems to be on Yahoo! Check out m.yahoo.com/ncaa (don’t forget the “m”) and you can get the latest scores, the tourney schedule, and even check out your Yahoo! bracket online.

Who will you be rooting for?

Must have apps for SXSW Music Fest

The South by Southwest Music Festival started yesterday and runs through this Sunday. If you’re heading to Austin to hear some of the kick-ass bands, you should check out Wired’s five essential apps and iPhone-friendly sites first. We’ve listed them here with an abbreviated description:

1.) Bandloop – Free app that shows you a map of nearby gigs in whatever city you’re in. Use the GPS feature to see a map of your area with club markers. Each marker lists club info, upcoming bands, photos, descriptions and website links.

2.) JamBase – A free app created by the popular concert listing website. Login and filter through the database of live shows to see where your favorite bands are playing. When you find that can’t miss gig, tap the listing to see a map and e-mail the details to your friends.

3.) last.fm – The music site has created a tool called SXSW Band Aid. Login and get a personalized list of recommended shows. Add the ones you want to attend to your own personal calendar, e-mail the details or invite your last.fm friends, too.

4.) Sched.org – Head to sxsw2009.sched.org for an unofficial event listings. You can filter by date, view parties, and find concerts. It also finds free MP3 downloads for you.

5.) SonicLiving – A concert listing service with a special SXSW section. You can browse today’s shows by time, artist and venue. Login and you can build your own schedule, view friends schedules and invite friends to a show. Also connects you to Applandia’s free Taxi app to find an empty cab – good luck with that.

Bandloop

iPhone OS 3.0 Preview

Hats off to Tom Krazit of CNET who did a great job live blogging the Apple event yesterday. You can read his entire coverage here because it’s too lengthy to cut and paste into our blog.

Hey, speaking of cut and paste, it will be available on the iPhone OS 3.0! Kevin Rose’s leak turned out to be pretty accurate. Here are some of the 100 new features that got us excited:

— Apple will support several new app business models such as subscription and in-app purchasing
— Support of “seamless” peer-to-peer networking
— Turn-by-turn apps can be developed thanks to GPS technology (but they can’t use built-in Maps)
— More than 1,000 APIs will be available to developers
— Video-streaming tech will allow game highlights can be delivered to the iPhone, rather than pulled by the user
— MMS support (it’s about time!)

Also noteworthy is the fact that Apple has sold 30 million iPhone and iPod Touches through the end of 2008 and the App Store has seen 800 million downloads. Not too shabby! And even though there has been a lot of talk about the app approval process, Apple claims they have given the green light to 96% of submissions.

The update is schedule for “this summer” and is free to iPhone users, although not all upgrades (like MMS) will work on the original iPhone. iPod Touch users will have to pay $9.95.

Preview of iPhone OS Cut and Paste

Digg.com founder Kevin Rose has released a video he filmed at SXSW discussing the new iPhone 3.0 OS cut and paste feature. According to Kevin, you double tap on a word and the magnifying glass comes up with quotation marks at the beginning and end. You can then drag the quotes over the content that you want to manipulate and a pop up will give you the choice to copy, cut or paste.

Kevin said that his source told him the iPhone will match the capabilities of the Palm Pre, but did not give any specifics. Rumors suggested it might include MMS but Kevin shoots that idea down. He also says the iPhone will still not run background apps or have video capture.

You can check out PC World’s list of what the iPhone 3.0 OS should have here. What new features are you looking for?

Adrants reports on SXSW show

Adrants.com gives us a report on what’s being talked about at the SXSW show.

Saturday’s session at SXSW 2009 on Emerging Trends in Mobile gave audience members food for thought and panelists a run for their money.

The heavily international crowd (which included an estimated 25 percent non-American attendants) seemed to be, from a show of hands, a well-informed group with a good number of mobile developers in attendance.

Topics ranged from better device-charging solutions to developing for devices that come closer to standard Internet browsing every year. All in all, it was given that WAP technology is dead, fully Flash-enabled devices are the next step, image recognition capabilities and more detailed location-based information are crucial, and the idea that you’d have to actually plug a device into an outlet for any reason is becoming increasingly laughable

10 things the new iPhone OS should have

PC Mag has a list of 10 things that the iPhone’s 3.0 OS should have. And we tend to agree with all of it so we just copied it and pasted.

10.) Cut and paste. This is painfully obvious. Cut and paste is a core Apple feature, all the way back to the first Mac, and it’s something everyone expects in text editing. When the iPhone 3G launched, Apple’s Greg Joswiak told me that Apple didn’t have anything against cut and paste, they just hadn’t gotten around to it. It’s time.

9.) MMS support. No one has ever been able to explain to me why Apple disdains picture messaging. MMS support is a no-brainer.

8.) A shared sandbox. iPhone apps each run in their own little data space, which is great for security but awful for apps that want to work on the same data (like an office program trying to read e-mail attachments.) Apple needs to build a shared data area that apps can drop “public” files into.

7.) Some background functionality. Maybe it’s push notifications, like Apple promised a year ago. Maybe it’s true background tasks. In any case, it’s absolutely silly that instant messaging apps, Twitter apps, and such have no way of telling you that you have new messages while you’re doing something else.

6.) Wireless stereo. Steve Jobs rightfully disdains Bluetooth stereo audio because it generally sounds awful. But there have been a lot of innovations in wireless stereo recently, and whatever technology Apple chooses to bless would instantly become the leader. Whether Apple goes with Kleer, one of the new lossless Bluetooth stereo codecs or something totally new, it’s time to free us from the tangle of headset cords.

5.) Better power management. The iPhone burns through battery because it’s used more heavily, and in more different ways, than any other device. That means many iPhone owners feel their phones have relatively short battery life. Since Apple will never allow a replaceable battery, let’s suggest some smarter power-management software to keep the phone going for longer on a charge.

4.) Better home screen customization. Let’s be able to throw away the default icons, like that stupid stock widget. And let’s be able to fully theme our iPhones, the way the illicit WinterBoard program lets hackers do.

3.) Video recording (and a better photo app). We know the iPhone can record video, because various people have hacked its software to do so. Time for that feature to become official. Also, would it hurt the photo app to have a settings panel, for folks who want to be able to play with things like picture resolution and night-shot mode? And the home button should be the shutter.

2.) Tethering. AT&T lets you use a wide variety of smart phones as modems for your laptop, with the appropriate service plan. It’s never been clear why the iPhone was left off the list. Apple and AT&T should fix the problem with iPhone 3.0.

1.) Breaking the AT&T agreement. In two years of covering the iPhone, the number one complaint I’ve heard from iPhone owners of all stripes is about AT&T service. I know it’s a hopeless dream, but I’d love Steve Jobs to get up on a stage in Cupertino and cry, “iPhones for everyone!”

The Onion weighs in on iPhone app usage

Check out this link from The Onion. Their “What do you think?” section never gets old with me, even if other (ok, most) sections have kind of jumped the shark. They ask “random people” what they think of the fact that iPhone free app usage drops off after the first month of downloading. That link is here.

You may not know it, but Apple owns you

Even though you went out and bought an iPhone, Apple claims it still owns the software your phone runs on. Therefore, jailbreaking your iPhone is illegal. And if jailbreaking is illegal, then Cydia and any other virtual store selling apps must be illegal too. I think we all know where this is going. Apple doesn’t want users buying apps from any place other than the app store.

And why should they? They have created a dominant marketplace where they not only get to control what apps are approved, they get to take 30% of the sales to boot. But if you’re an app developer, frustration is rising. You can spend lots of time and money developing an app only to be rejected, and if you are accepted you have to fork over some of the profits.

This one may land in the courts. TechSpot has more.

Everyone can afford “A Personal Assistant”

MacWorld tipped us off on a new app, PageOne’s A Personal Assistant, that “attempts to simplify the task of monitoring your digital life by collecting and displaying account information from a variety of services.”

Basically it puts all of your online accounts for services such as banking, movies, travel and social media in one place so you don’t have to go to multiple websites and log in. The simplified version is available for free, but has built-in ads.

The premium version, which goes for $10, offers more services and real-time data for some services such as travel. And if you think putting all of your personal data in one place is asking for trouble, you’re right. So developer PageOnce added passcode locking and the ability to remotely erase all personal information from your phone on the company’s website.

Watchmen game for iPhone

Guess who is absolutely sick of hearing about Watchmen? The next thing these guys will watch is me puking.

Now, it seems that there is a Watchmen game for the iPhone and it retails for less than $1. The game, Watchmen: Justice is coming, allows players to fight in a 3D environment that looks like NYC in the 1970’s. If you like the movie and/or books or comic books or whatever the hell it is, chances are you’ll dig the game.

App Store Hits 25,000+

People may be complaining that Apple’s censorship is too tight (and we agree), but the apps are still rolling in.

Information Week reports:

The company [Apple] said that as of Monday there were 27,131 applications in the store that can be downloaded for an iPhone 3G or iPod Touch. The number of mobile programs is staggering considering the App Store has been open for about a year. By contrast, Microsoft’s mobile operating system has been out for a lot longer than the iPhone, but analysts estimate there are about 20,000 applications.