Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

Its nearly been a full month since I submitted Photo Rotate 1.6 to Apple, but fear not, it has not been lost in the void. Last week I received a call from Apple and there was a small issue with some of the application’s iTunes App Store descriptive text that references limitations in the SDK which they wanted me to remove. I promptly did as they asked and now I suspect the update has been ‘released’ from purgatory back to the end of the approval queue.

In the meantime I have been working on Photo Rotate 1.7 focusing on memory usage and low memory handling, which at this rate might be submitted before 1.6 even gets cleared. We’ll see how it goes.

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

The iPhone/iPod 3.0 OS allows third-party applications to utilize the device’s Bluetooth capabilities for two-player games. The first (and only) application I had that supported this in an update was Flight Control, and since then, whenever my wife and I are on a train, we occupy our time playing this.

The huge advantage of multiplayer Bluetooth compared with Wi-Fi is that you just need the two devices, no Wi-Fi access points or Internet connectivity is required. This is truly awesome, although as we cry, “Arrrgh sooo close!” loudly on public transport we can get some strange looks. We’ve loved playing Flight Control, but I thought that by now there must be a good number of other Bluetooth-enabled games. So I’ve searched the App Store and found the following games are the only ones that support multiplayer gameplay over Bluetooth. This list will hopefully grow soon with more complex quality titles.

Check out what I found at The Apple Blog

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

Years ago I discovered a little futuristic hovercraft racing game on the PlayStation called Wipeout. The concept was simple, and in many ways it was pretty much the same gameplay as Mario Kart or Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart. What set it apart was that there were no cartoon graphics, and no toy weapons, just stunning futuristic graphics, unique craft handling (being hovercrafts) and the most important element: speed. These crafts could go really fast.

So as an avid fan of the Wipeout series, when I found out about Phaze I immediately had to try it. Phaze is pretty much a Wipeout clone for the iPhone. There’s nothing new added, it just takes the concept and translates it. This suits me fine. The question is how good the implementation is. Does it capture the magic that got me hooked to Wipeout all those years ago?

Read my review at The Apple Blog

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

Photo Rotate 1.6 has been submitted to Apple for approval. This version has the following changes:
* Fixes positioning offset bug in the Crop function.
* The crop area is now always clearly highlighted in a transparent blue for proper framing.
Version 1.5 took two weeks to clear the approval process (previously versions only took about one week), Apple seems to be overloaded with updates at the moment, so I would expect a two week wait or so.

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

I love reading interviews with developers, finding out some of the behind the scenes information on the makings of their products. Even more so when they’re my favorite products, the ones I use every day. Being able to put a personal face and story behind an end-user application puts a human story on the technology that I find fascinating. So, in the first of hopefully many such interviews, I caught up with Steve Gehrman, founder of CocoaTech, maker of the esteemed Path Finder application — a super charged alternative to Apple’s own Finder.

Read my interview with Steve over at The Apple Blog

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve never been as organized as I am with the combination of my MacBook Pro, iPhone, and Google Calendar. Sure, before I crossed the line to Apple, I had tried to use Thunderbird (with Lightning’s Calendar plugin) to keep organized, syncing to my Windows Mobile phone, but it was always clunky and slow and not worth the effort when things didn’t “Just Work.” Since tasting the sweet Apple pie, I now have multiple Google calendars shared with my wife and synced to both of our Macs and iPod touch/iPhones with Spanning Sync. We are now totally organized and its awesome.

However, like any data system, it’s a case of garbage in, garbage out. The combination of data corruption and synchronization is one that can wreak total and utter havoc on the most organized of people, rendering us as useless as a fish out of water. To combat the potential of this scenario, the folks over at Spanning Sync have released a public beta of its new utility, Spanning Tools.

Read more at The Apple Blog

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

Back in the Dark Ages (iPhone 2.0 firmware) jailbreaking your iPhone had many points of merit. It could give you MMS, Copy & Paste, tethering, video recording, info on your lock screen and more. However, for me the reasons I jailbroke were for MMS, Copy & Paste, and internet tethering.

So when the much awaited 3.0 release was finally here, I thought to myself “Great, no need to jailbreak anymore.” I installed my developer’s copy of the beta firmware and there was much rejoicing with smooth, Apple home-cooked MMS, copy & paste, and internet tethering.

But then, as I watched episodes of Arrested Development via XBMC using my iPhone as the remote, or lay in bed on my side trying to read news feeds without the screen rotating when I didn’t want it to, I really really missed SBSettings. So it came to be that the day the jailbreak devteam released their official PwnageTool for 3.0 I immediate jailbroke my 3.0 iPhone. Just for one application: SBSettings. It really does bring that much convenience to the table.

Read why I still Jailbreak with 3.0 for SBSettings over at The Apple Blog

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

Photo Rotate 1.5 has finally been approved by Apple (after longer than normal delays, no doubt related to the OS 3.0 release today). It should be available from the AppStore anytime now.

* This adds a powerful “Crop” button – this lets you do arbitrary rotation, scaling and positioning using single and two finger gestures.
* Full OS 3.0 Support (but not required, works with OS 2.2.1).

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

The clipboard in a modern operating system is one of the most useful and practical tools available. Being able to select some text or images, copy them to the clipboard, and then paste them in other places is indispensable (look at the uproar over the fact that the iPhone OS 1.0 & 2.0 did not support a clipboard to see how valuable it is). You most likely use it without giving it another thought.

The standard clipboard behavior is that when you copy a new item, it replaces the existing item. You can’t go back to the previous item as there is no history of items copied. This is what a Clipboard Manager does, providing a memory and browsing history so you can paste something, and then find it later, even after using the clipboard multiple times.

There are quite a few Clipboard Managers available for OS X, some free, some not. Check out 10 of them over at The Apple Blog.

Originally published at abednarz.net. Please leave any comments there.

Photo Rotate 1.5 has been submitted to Apple for approval. This adds a nifty Crop function, that lets you do arbitrary rotation, scaling and positioning using single and two finger gestures.. Its also iPhone OS 3.0 ready. Hopefully this will be approved within the next week.

In other Photo Rotate news, there’s a bit of competition in the simple iphone photo rotating category now, hence me making Photo Rotate the easiest and most powerful while still focusing on rotation.

To see how good Photo Rotate is, take a look at this review over at Tim Obrien Photos.