The iPhone 1.0.2 update was released today via Software Update and iTunes. Keep in mind that this update will erase any prior hacks that you have installed on your iPhone, and most likely reset the device to 0 state if you have done any modifications.
According to early updaters, the upgrade provides louder earpiece volume, and also smoother scrolling when pages are loading in Safari. More updates after we do some test installs.
Gizmodo has posted instructions on using the awesome Installer.app to put third-party applications on the iPhone. As opposed to the "Web 2.0" type applications, these are native Cocoa applications and run at native processor speed in RAM.
Gizmodo's instructions can be found here, and if followed to the letter give you a utility on your iPhone to install other third party applications.
The first apps you should install are the BSD Subsystem and Community Sources. This gives you a good baseline for any other applications.
Amazon.com today has released a beta of an iPhone version of their website. On your iPhone, simply navigate to Amazon.com and you'll get a large hit-area to try their iphone beta. Amazon has eschewed a nicely designed site in place of a generally functional site.
The iPhone site provides an easy means of browsing top selling music, searching the marketplace and maintaining your account, without any frills to get in the way of fast browsing over EDGE.
Facebook iPhone Edition - Facebook has just launched what might be the nicest looking Safari based app for the iPhone in existence. It allows seamless, easy updating of your profile and browsing of your social-graph through the iPhone.
Watch any Google Video - this YouTube video to see how to stream any Google Video as an H264 file suitable for iPhone either either Wifi or Edge
Apple today released a slew of updates to their product suite, which included updates to the iLife product. Including in this update is a brand new iPhoto which features direct integration with both .Mac (which it had before) and the iPhone (which it had, but only basics). The update gave the ability for the iPhone to upload directly to the new-fangled Web 2.0 ish photo interface on your .Mac account.
When you take a picture on the iPhone, there is now an option to upload to a Web Gallery. This feature only appears if you have your .Mac account setup on the iPhone. Do note that this setting took a few hours to appear on my iPhone.
It appears that you also need to have Upload via E-mail enabled from a gallery that you publish to .Mac through iPhoto for this feature to work.
It also appears that it only uploads the VGA versions of photos, not the full resolution one. The ability to upload full resolution photos from the iPhone is still missing (sadly).
For an example of one photo uploaded through iPhoto (from Photobooth), and one from iPhone, check My new Gallery, which I'll update periodically.
Elgato has released an update to their turbo.264 video encoding tool. This USB dongle off-loads a bulk of the CPU load for H.264 encoding (the format used by iPhone, AppleTV and iPod) to a dedicated chip.
The hardware comes with video encoding software, but will also work if you use presets that it defines from any Quicktime exporting application. Note that this does not include Handbrake.
To convert a DVD to iPhone using Turbo.264, you should use Mac The Ripper to unencrypt the VIDEO_TS folder, then use the Elgato software to convert that for the iPhone. This will yield excellent quality video as well.
Apple has released a 1.0.1 software update for the iPhone to fix a number of security issues with the device. Be warned that the software update checks the validity of your phone's operating system, and if it detects a hack will put the phone in restore mode.
In restore mode, it'll download the update and restore the firmware, but any modifications made through iFuntastic will be over-written.
Also realize, all your settings go as well. Thusfar, we can't find any changes made to the core OS, but we'll keep looking.
UPDATE - Using iFuntastic again (the 2.0 beta) re-enables all the hacks, and the phone continues to function fine through iTunes.
The iPhone camera might be the weakest part of the device, outside of the EDGE data speed. Because of the lack of a hard shutter button, taking the customary "friends in a club" photo (self portrait, arms length) is extremely difficult.
However, unlike a lot of camera phones, the iPhone does not activate the sensor (indicated by the shutter noise) until you release the shutter key. So, if you want to take a photo of yourself, put your thumb on the shutter, hold the phone out, and then release it.
While it is possible to make amazing applications on the iPhone using Web 2.0 technologies, these applications are still dependent on the Edge or Wifi connection to function. On an airplane, or without cell service, nothing works.
Some intrepid developers found out that you can use base-64 encoding to put an entire web-page, images, javascript and CSS in a bookmark. In addition to being able to store Web applications locally, this can also let one store files on the iPhone (until Apple enables file storage).
There are two tools out for this:
Web Page Convertor -- this tool takes any URL and using a Perl script, converts all included files and the base file into a data bookmark, which you can then file away in Safari and sync up.
FIlemark Maker -- this application lets you take any file and convert it to a data-bookmark, for photos, text, etc.
The iPhone is interesting in that it has Wi-Fi and Edge in it, and runs OSX. By default, OSX can share any network connection over any network connection. Meaning it acts as a router between any one of its I/O methods for TCP/IP traffic. In this way for instance, you can turn your MacBook Pro into a wi-fi router, sharing your Verizon card.
This hack does something similar, in that it makes the iPhone act as a Wi-Fi proxy to the Internet. You connect to your iPhone after the hack is applied via an ad-hoc (point to point) Wi-Fi network.
The hack is somewhat detailed and technical, but if you put your own ringtones on the iPhone, the process is not much more difficult than that.
