By Steven Frank (via Merlin Mann)

What makes us hard:
- Inbuilt URL shortening using many of the latest available services, including the new Digg short url service.
- Post updates to facebook.
- Filter tweets by Name, Text, Source and Time.
- View links to TwitPic’s from within TweetDeck.
- ‘Groups’ allows one to create a stream of tweets from specific users (so you can still follow/handshake people, and avoid their tweets about the awesome tomato sandwich they just made).

What makes us floppy:
- No mutliple accounts management, ala Twhirl and the Tweetie.
- To ‘untick’ a tweet as read, one has to dexterously click on a tiny circle (bottom left) whereas in Twhirl, one can click anywhere on the tweet to ‘untick’; much easier and therefore quicker.

In conclusion:
There are many other features the latest beta of TweetDeck has to offer that may come in handy – especially if you need to translate your tweets into another language. But if you have multiple twitter accounts you frequently use, you’re out of luck for the moment.

A popular app with the twitter community, Tweetdeck is a solid and good looking choice.

Download for free from tweetdeck.com

There comes a time in any teenage boy’s life when they feel the urge to measure their junk.

The same is sometimes true in day-to-day OS X living.

Sometimes when I’ve been on a rampant deleting spree through all my files, I want to know how many megs I managed to knock off my minuscule MacBook Air SSD in order to feel good about myself, before recycling them all to hell.

Unfortunately there is no easy way to check this from the Trash Can itself, but here’s another simple way:

From Finder, Go To Folder (Command + Shift + G) and enter:

~/.Trash

This will expose the otherwise hidden Trash folder, allowing you to do a quick Get Info (Command + I) to size it up. (Any folder with a leading period is automatically hidden in OS X).

Snow Leopard is expected to bring improvements to OS X’s Trash, including the ability to restore accidentally deleted files to their original location with one-click.

*Image not to scale

See! It was only going to be a matter of time before Google Maps came down with something nasty after consistently spreading its legs for the iPhone, the G1, and now a plethora of other mobile devices in dark alleyways.

The introduction of the new Map API in iPhone software 3.0, will only further extend its reach into many more mobile apps. We just hope they use protection.

Hot off the heels of Dan’s own search for a laptop for under $1000, it appears that Homeless Frank of Landline TV is also on the case.

Boom. One after the other. Don’t show the Windoze fanboys!!

Perhaps the beginning of a spin-off site ala UnexpectedlyQuit.com?

Flop Ya Mac Out casually observes that John Gruber’s latest batch of t-shirts default to ‘Guy XL’ when one places an order.

One can rest assured that when Flop Ya Mac Out releases t-shirts, upon ordering, they’ll be defaulting to ‘Ladies Tight Fit.’

Horses for courses, people. Horses for courses.

—

Full disclosure: Flop Ya Mac Out owns Daring Fireball t-shirt stock.
We love you, John.

Is normal porn getting you fat? Change your diet! Find out how, as Barry Buckfist shows you some “real melons” in this mostly SFW screencast. On a Mac – no less.

The developer of iPhone app, Wobble, gives an equally Australian demo of his app, using words such as “outstanding” to exclaim the hearty goodness this app creates.

And he’s not about to get sexist either, ’cause “Here’s one for the ladies”, and boy are they in for a lolly bag of treats!

I give the film below, 5 stars. Enjoy.

[via fforward]

Hi Apple!

I really love the new Genius playlist creation feature in iTunes 8 – works really well for me – but there’s a small thing I’d love to see changed to make the creation of a Genius playlist just that little bit more smooth and seamless.

If I’m playing a song and decide I want to create a Genius playlist, I hit the Genius button and it creates the playlist, but it takes the song I’m playing back the very start again. This sort of ruins the flow of creating a Genius playlist. Makes it a less seamless experience. I find myself manually skipping through the song to get to where I was before I put your Genius to use.

So if my current song was able to continue playing uninterrupted whilst getting put to the top of the newly created Genius playlist, that would be the tastey icing on the moist cake Jerry may or may not have been talking about. Hold the “chewyness” though. I’m not yet sure how I feel about that.

Thanks!

Love,

Apple fanboy.
xo

As someone who is gearing up to head overseas, I’ve put my laptop into somewhat of a lock-down mode, password protecting everything to make sure that it can’t be molested if it falls into the wrong hands abroad.

However, the drawback of such tight security is that (with the omission of physical labelling), if my laptop falls into the right hands, there’s no way the finder can figure out who the laptop actually belongs to.

Enter this handy hint, sourced from Apple’s own Leopard Security Configuration Guide. The hack allows you to place a custom phrase in the OS X Leopard Login Screen, just above the user name and password.

Crank up the terminal, and enter the following:

su [your admin username]
sudo -s
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText “This laptop belongs to Jason Deacon, and you don’t.”

Of course, you may want to garnish your welcome message with maybe a contact phone number, email address or more impressive message than the example here.

The beauty of this hack is that as your contact details change when you travel, updating them is a simple as re-entering this into terminal. No more re-printing labels on the road, and you’re able to enter much more information here, too.

The Apple Security Guide is a good read, which I thoroughly recommend if you’ve got an eye for that sort of thing. We’ll explore more security tips in time!

An employee at Optus has confirmed to flop ya mac out that not only does he enjoy a good book, but more importantly the iPhone 3G when purchased ‘pre-paid’ style with the Optus network will be able to be unlocked for a fee of $80. The ‘post-paid’ plan iPhone will be able to be unlocked for free. Free! Free.

Of course once you are signed up on a two year contract, typically the only way to cancel your contract is to pay out the full term of your contract, which is likely to be more than a grand.

But given most of the Australian carriers will end up offering iPhone it seems, having an unlocked Phone may not be all that important? I guess it depends if we can sell them to China for a decent price!

Our delicious source also mentioned that Optus is designing special iPhone plans, which is to be expected, given the data requirements for using iPhone and the mostly shite data plans currently available. They are also apparently upgrading their Optus Zoo service.

Optus Zoo is the awesome name for their Intranet that allows you to do cool things that are too cool for me to use, so much so I have never bothered to see what the service really offers with my current Optus plan.

The new Optus Zoo service is reportedly going to have an ‘i’ tacked onto its name so that people will know the service is Apple-like and therefore a service you can show off in front of your grandma and friends and still get ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’.

‘iZoo’ sounds more like the noise you make when you sneeze and hopefully will remain invisible to Optus iPhone users that don’t wish to engage in their carrier specific offerings, how ever ‘Apple delicious’ they may be. Oh, stop it!

More information about plans is bound to be released leading up the release of iPhone 3G around the world in 22 countries on the 11th of July, so let us all pray the plans available to Australian users won’t be as painfully pricey as our broadband plans are!

UPDATE: Further details to hand…

• iZoo will be accessed via an icon on the home screen, that will give access to further services, such as a petrol pump finder that locates the cheapest petrol available near you, then guides you to it using GPS.
• Unlimited data with plans, with the option of an unlimited calls plan at the high end.

UPDATE 2: Optus iPhone 3G pricing now available here.

Damn it! To register root.me from Godaddy for a minimum two years is AU$104.84!

Time’s running out to register a “dot me”, so I guess I’ll have to point ladies I fancy to some other URL to make a sweet proposition to love…

an.us/fun-times?

My best guess is they are there because the iPhone can be a little slippery to hold. (So I’ve found. Though do I love the silver matte finish…) Perhaps the rubbery-looking case is simply there to prevent demo slippage?

Imagine the guy is showing off Sega’s Monkey Ball and whoops!! There goes the iPhone.

Has anyone seen this sorta case for sale?

We discuss the iPhone 3G, WWDC 2008 keynote and more, in flop ya mac out 38: post-wwdc banana milkshake.

We can’t be penalised – we didn’t sign NDA’s anyway! Ha!

Enjoy!

Needless to say, the anticipation was killing us!

Oh, wow. Steve’s really done it this time…

iPhone 2.0 really does scroll like butter. Quick, somebody call me on it!

Download this as a PowerPoint to share with your friends!

If this gave you a smile, you may also like to send us a Digg.
We’re a weekly Mac podcast, pants optional. Subscribe with iTunes here.

Sounds like the new 3G iPhone. Perhaps. Sorta. Hopefully!

Well… It’s not. It’s Sumsung’s new “iPhone killer”. Stated in the video below, this thing is set to come out ib June. But will June be too late?

If this new version of the iPhone can deliver on most of the features above (as it really should have in it’s original incarnation – I mean no video recording – really!) then I think it’s pretty much still gonna shit all over the Instinct.

There’s no going past the iPhones sexy interface, and soon to be hundreds of applications and games to make the Apple touch platform the yummiest thing since a really yummy sandwich. That was surprisingly yummy in a rather non-sandwich way.

Sandwich goodness plus “seem-less” interoperability with the iTunes world of content is just part of what makes the iPhone a force to be reckoned with.

Fingers crossed for the WWDC keynote! Check out the promotional ad for the Instinct below. 

Within a number of hours, this ad could become extinct, irrelevant and just downright incorrect. And good laugh.

(via TUAW)

UPDATE: Well well well… Post-WWDC, it looks like Samsung, for now, will have the last laugh! That is unless Apple just wants to surprise us all with video recording capabilities closer to the release date of the new iPhone 3G!… 

“Tut tut tut, Apple” is all I can say…

It was with much annoyance that Dan and I found out that some crafty, iPhone-flogging eBayer in Australia has been hot-linking to our images here at Flop Ya Mac Out, in a bid to brighten up his eBay page.

Sure, we may glean the odd photo here and there off Google Images ourselves, but we feel there is a distinction between doing this, and free-loading on someone’s bandwidth for profit, without asking.

We meditated over this for a while, and then formulated the perfect plan.

Amidst fits of giggling, we sourced some suitably appropriate ‘equivalent images,’ (we decided against hardcore porn after much debate), uploaded them to our server, and then let them fly.

Better still, once eBay pages are submitted, the code can’t be changed! We hope they’ll sway perspective buyers even more so now than before, but see what you think.

Results follow:

Brings new meaning to Virgin Mobile, no? A cheeky lesson learnt, but one he’ll never forget.

If Jobs were not born

Apple products I could not yearn

I have me no lady

But I have a picture of you above my bed.

Steve Jobs, only because of you

Do I have something to look forward to

Come next Tuesday morn

I’ll wake not with a yawn

As I’ll wake at dawn

Not to surf porn

But I’ll open up Engadget and Macrumors too

To view the live reporting of the WWDC Keynote – Ooo!

Loins firm, eyes peeled for what I shall next consume

Sleepless night…

Sleepless night’o'joy.   

“Track pad? What do you mean use the track pad on the laptop? Well, what if I put if I put it… here, like this? I’m using it on the laptop now aren’t I?

You know, we really should plug a keyboard into this thing.”

Bo Diddley, indeed.

Do I simply place it back in its box, so that in years to come I can look up to that dusty mantle and comment to my grandson, gesturing with my smokey pipe,

“Fucking look at that son! No, up there on the mantle piece! Underneath the dust! See that box? Best box ever – ‘cept for your Grandma’s! Ha ha.. But seriously – listening to me now, eyes this way son – that young man, that, is an original Apple iPhone. Best piece of technology you could buy back in the day. It may look a little bulky nowadays, but believe me, that piece of beautiful art did more than just look pretty – it was a Phone, an iPod, an Internet communications device!…”

Perhaps I could give my old iPhone a new lease of life – a change of career if you will – and use it to shave with and drink beer from… Though no doubt people would stop hanging around with me at the bar, as I bragged about how this was to the my 15th beer I’d chugged from my iPhone, and could still whoop everyones arse at pool…

Perhaps I should just keep my old iPhone next to my bed, in case I have had too many real beers, and I can’t quite seem to pleasure that special someone I picked up tonight; that’s when I have the phone fully charged, with finger poised over the iBrate app…

Having a jailbroken iPhone could never be more important, could it Steve. 

Well, seems like I sorted out this problem with a little “diary entry” work. Thanks for listening guys. 

Saw this on the train today. Nice to know our trains are running state of the art 1990’s chipsets.

You may be thinking, well laptops have been around for ages, but no, they’re putting their world class graphics processors into a mobile phone… This phone doesn’t have a name as yet, but that will all come later.

The phone has been described as “iPhone busting” and yeah, we’ve all heard that before, only this time I’m a little scared. Here’s some specs courtesy of mobilementalism.com:

• ARM11 MPCore
• HD AVP (High Definition Audio Video Processor) 720p H.264, MPEG-4, and VC-1/WMV9 Decoder
• 720p H.264 and MPEG-4 Encoder
• Supports multi-standard audio formats including AAC, AMR, WMA, and MP3
• JPEG encode and decode acceleration
• ULP (Ultra Low Power) GeForce GPU
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• D3D Mobile
• Programmable pixel shader
• Programmable vertex and lighting
• CSAA support
• Advanced 2D graphics
• Up to 12Mpixel camera sensor support
• Advanced imaging features
• True dual display support
• 720p (1280×720) HDMI 1.2 support
• SXGA (1280×1024) LCD and CRT support
• Composite and S-Video TV output

That’s just the hardware. The bit that really made me shudder was when I saw a few videos of it’s User Interface. This one from YouTube shows the phones user interface and some of the Apps the phone may have. Runs as smooth as the iPhone would but it just incorporates a bit more 3D animation and rendering in it as well.

The other one that caught my eye was the one where the phone is being outputted to a high definition LCD TV. Check it out, the ability to morph videos and move them around while they play simultaneously, is pretty impressive.

So if there was ever anything that could rival the iPhone’s ‘yet to be seriously challenged’ form, this could be it. It has the specs, but what else can it offer us? And what does Apple have in store for us on June 9th?

All we can do is wait and see… I’m sure that fellow iPhone lovers are really hoping that Apple can pull out a can of whoop ass and do something incredible as some of this hardware is rivalling an entry level laptop… And that’s why we can’t breath until June 9th.

The Google Van, or a subcontractor for Google (similar as Skyhook in the U.S.) has been trawling the streets of Melbourne and beyond in preparation for a looming Australian iPhone launch.

Choosing ‘Locate Me’ in the iPhone Maps app now reads location settings from Wifi hotspots in and around the city, in addition to using Cell Tower Triangulation, giving yet another ominous sign that the iPhone is just that little bit closer to launch here.

Locate Me data is becoming increasingly more accurate right across the state, with readers reporting being located to their nearest street corner, as far out of Melbourne as Croydon.

Using Locate Me with Wifi turned off.

Using Locate Me with Wifi enabled.

Although iPhone firmware 1.1.4 unlocked does not automatically support the Map app’s Locate Me feature, it can be enabled by loading a 3rd party app Triangulation app first, which somehow tricks the iPhone into enabling the Triangulation service on the device.

How far out have you found Wifi Triangulation in Melbourne?

In this week’s podcast, Dan & Jase look at Apple crash reports, 3G iPhone rumours in Australia, and other businesses using Macs to promote their non-Mac products! Click here to listen with iTunes.

Although the name is not as catchy, it does boast some features that Steve’s slaves are yet to plug into their shiny black box.

Some of the major points are that this handset is not only 3G capable but it also supports HSDPA. Now for those of you who don’t know, 3G can achieve speeds of around 2 Mbps – which is pretty fast. However HSDPA has a theoretical maximum speed of 14.4 Mbps! That’s a lot of porn.

Now one of the problems that Apple had with 3G chipboards was that they were power hungry (like their Government) hence one of the major reasons why they didn’t build them into the iPhone initially. But the F480 still manages to get around 300 hours of standby time, with all of its firepower going at its fullest! Where as the iPhone will only last around 250 hours.

Some other features include a 5 Megapixel camera with autofocus, flash and face detection, FM radio with RDS, expandable memory and also the ability to order a pizza when you’re hungry.

The thing that caught me the most was how closely it resembled the iPhone physically. The only difference being that there are three buttons at the bottom of the screen instead of just one.

Personally I have always taken a liking to Apple’s simplistic approach to design: if there’s more than one button, Steve will get John Mayer to play at Macworld again – OH SHIT! But i think that Apple has always excelled both in the design of the actual handset itself but also their user interfaces. Scroll down to the bottom of this GSM Arena review to view the video demonstrating the graphical interface of the phone and make up your own mind.

One figures that Apple do such a great job in their software design that they may not need lightspeed data transfer speeds (boom!) or a camera that can take pictures the size of a small truck. I personally think that all other mobile phone companies are trying to make up for lack of a good looking, easy to use UI in hardware specs. But when it comes down to it, i think that more people will be interested in how they can use their phone rather than what they can use it for. But hey, some of those features may be nice?

So will Apple do their usual thing and get a few leaps and bounds in front of everyone else by supporting things such as HSDPA and a bazillion megapixel cameras? Or will they do the smart thing and improve on what they are already great at?

Only time will tell…WWDC June 9-13. Be there… In front of your computer… watching the Keynote.

Jules has a fine interest in mobile phones, owns a beautiful white MacBook, and also has a taste for hacking apart/together old PC’s. He doesn’t have an iPhone, we hope you can forgive him for that. Give him a month and 3 weeks of savings, and we’re sure this may be different.

Please give Jules an arousing standing ovation as he brings to you some fine quality FYMO dosh. Dan and I would also like to take this opportunity to say that we are also going to be blogging more, too. Word-o.

After tonight’s podcast, we turned out attention to waveform of our voices on Dan’s screen, and before too long we were attempting phallic-shaped pictures by manipulating our voices.

Dan’s is the more slender and less satisfying first piece, while mine is the larger, more manly effort below.

Better still, we kept the corresponding audio files, which sound almost more titillating than the resulting waveforms!

In this week’s episode we give the low down on Vodafone and Optus taking on the iPhone in Australia, as well as Channel Nine’s ‘Windows on the iPhone’ gaff.

Channel Nine this evening ran a story on its 6:00 bulletin claiming that a “leading IT website” has announced that it is “Optus who won the battle to bring Apple’s iPhone to Australia.”

To add insult to injury, the image used by the Microsoft-affiliated Network Nine to compliment the story, depicted an iPhone running Windows XP. This was complete with Bliss background, windows taskbar, and Internet Explorer displaying the Ninemsn.com.au website. Apple’s Mail icon interestingly was been replaced by Parallels, a program used on the Mac to run Windows via a process called virtualisation. Nice.

Investigation shows that Cnet.com.au is the “leading IT website” that Nine is alluding to. Yet the article in question is no more conclusive than any of the other plentiful rumour websites. Cnet claims that “Optus is confirmed to be one of several Australian mobile service providers to be selling Apple’s iPhone.” This certainly isn’t what one might describe as ‘winning the battle’ for the iPhone.

The Sydney Morning Herald and later, SBS World News also jumped at the Optus story, providing little more details than Cnet, and just like Network Nine, failed to directly link to their source at Cnet.

For your fix of Australian iPhone and Mac news and opinions, subscribe to Flop Ya Mac Out with iTunes!

Sounds good enough for me to go “Woo!”.

I don’t have the Google Talk client installed, so I Googled around to find out if this was a new feature or just an anomoly, but within two searches the only relevant results that came up were this this article which showed a different implementation of the inbuilt call feature, and this other one talking about the possibility of what I saw, coming soon.

Nothing happened when i pressed the new buttons of the box that sat bottom left in the web browser, and refreshing the page got rid of it.

Rather random, but perhaps I got a sneak peek at how the call function is going to integrated into the ‘chat’ box (on the left), when you click on a contact. Is this news? Or have others seen this too?

Feel free to speculate what the music symbol and purple circle are all about…

I tried trashing the permissions business – didn’t help. So i literally just deleted only the Soundtrack Pro application file and re-installed it from the discs. Which took over 5 hours (and it estimated it would take over 12 hours! Had the installation lived up to it’s estimation, I would have screamed a little).

Installing the full Final Cut Studio takes at least a whole day of swapping between 6 or more DVD’s – craaaazy shit – and re-installing just one program really didn’t take a proportionally shorter amount of time! It still asked for each of the DVD’s to be loaded – even though only one is labeled Soundtrack something.

Soundtrack Pro has been such a stable audio editing solution that i edit fymo and bwym on, so this was rather dissappointing. It delayed me getting out ep 22 of fymo, and killed my cat.

Pro-Tools M-Powered i find easier to use as far as the actual editing goes, but you have to have an m-audio hardware interface plugged in, along with the Pro-Tools USB dongle… Then there’s the random crashes and problems with opening the bloody thing to begin with… And i can’t dedicate a machine to just Pro-Tools alone…

Soundtrack Pro means that i can truly have a portable, cable/dongle free editing solution on my laptop that gives me the option to export to an MP3 without having to fork out more money, ala Pro-Tools cockfag style.

So with Soundtrack Pro, if there’s a “next time” – which there better not be (’cause i’ve forked out good money on these programs) – i’ll just be trying a Time Machined version of the app… But hang on a sec… Mother f.. To save space on my smallish Time Machine HDD, i don’t back up applications.

Sounds like this could well be a good argument to spend more money.

I came across it via Engadget – check it out yourself here!

“Try the game that lets you experience what it feels like to be Steve Jobs just before your Keynote presentation.”

We hope you have sexy times, and wish you all the best for 2008! Happy listening! And buy ya self somethin’ pretty.

When iTunes 7.5 came out i eagerly downloaded it, as i have so many times before with all other Mac software updates. But for the first time, this one bit me in the arse.

I probably shouldn’t have thrown caution to the wind and updated, simply ’cause i’m running an unlocked, jail-breaked 1.1.1 iPhone as my main phone and organiser.

It turnes out iTunes 7.5 didn’t like to play with my iPhone, as when i connected them together in marriage, i got an error message (pictured) and was not able to access my iPhone – it simply didn’t come up in the side bar of iTunes.

So i searched for a way to downgrade back to iTunes 7.4.2 (which i was able to download), but couldn’t find a definitive guide or an answer to other people asking the same thing in threads.

So i decided to venture into risky territory and fix this via trial and error, as it was getting really irritating not being able to sync up new podcasts or contacts etc..

Firstly i sync-ed my iPhone’s contacts and calendar to my old PowerBook which was thankfully still running 7.4.2, just in case anything went wrong (so i could retain all the new info i’d entered into my iPhone’s calendar!)

I then copied iTunes.app to my desktop, as well as my “iTunes Library” and “iTunes Music Library.xml” so i could stick them back, in case they got written over with new old/new installation.

I then installed the 7.4.2 version and it went totally smoothly and totally worked! Fantastic.

Now i’ve just gotta remember not to update iTunes, as could easily be done via the software update without really realising, if you’re a little absent minded at the time.

But now what for the future? No iTunes updates for me and my hacked iPhone, forever? Perhaps!

Does 7.5 accidentally/on purpose now deny syncing with hacked iPhones, just like 1.1.1 stopped some jail-broken iPhones running at all?

Is this problem i had widespread enough that hackers are working on an iTunes fix?

Something else i wonder is if i was to update to 1.1.2, would iTunes 7.5 play nice with my iPhone?

Let us know your experiences or comments below.

The dealio is this: iPhone only knows how handle numbers of a certain length without an area code, and seeing as most of us are using iPhones with a US firmware, that length is the minimum American phone number length (much longer than that in Australia – 8 digits).

That means that when someone calls your iPhone from a home phone (or mobile) that doesn’t send the area code down the line (9### ####), and you have the number listed in your contacts with an area code (03 9### ####), then iPhone doesn’t quite cotton on to the fact that they’s the same thing.

Too many times I’ve received calls from friends, but iPhone didn’t clue on that they were in my Address Book, so I had to spend the first part of the conversation trying to figure out who they were without sounding like too much of a tool.

So you’ve done your Australian Phone Number Mod, what now?

Som people had reverted to adding both the area code version and the normal version of numbers to their contacts, but a better alternative is at hand! The chaps on the iPhone Dev Team have a workaround, by means of replacing the Springboard app. with a modified one. The modified one whispers sweet nothings into the iPhone’s ear about phone numbers being able to be only 8 numbers long and still cool.

Read up on the mod here.

For me this was an absolutely crippling problem, but there is surprisingly little info on the net about how to fix it.

Help share the love, and donate to the Dev Team if you find it of use!

After spending a good slab of my life loading the entire state of Victoria into my iPhone’s Google Map cache, iPhone turns around a bitch-slaps me.

Turns out that the cache has a time limit on it that removes the data when it is considered old. Awesome.

There must be a more intelligent way to manage the cache, surely? If I were an iPhone, I’d at least have the courtesy to compare my plethora of pre-loaded map data with the server to see if a more recent version had eclipsed it, rather than pulling it all down again over EDGE.

Well, it looks like we’ll just have to wait until that 3G iPhone hits the streets in 08 and makes caches in this capacity, redundant.

So, if you want to know the easiest way to look like a tool: scan through all available maps at all detail levels in your general area, brag about how youhave done this, then sit back, relax, and wait for iPhone to remove your handywork.

The iPhone has yet to be released in Australia, so this was a total shock. It was totally random, man.

Rove had just interviewed Jana Wendt, and asked who she would turn gay for as part of his “20 questions for $20″ segment. Jana gave the name of some Italian bird who Rove vaguely knew, so after the following commercial break, he showed the camera a picture of the Italian lady he had supposedly Googled, and right there on an iPhone.

Rove left the iPhone sitting on the “poof” in front of him for the remainder the segment. As they went to another break, Rove picked up the phone and showed it (or the screens contents) to the other guests on the couch and starting chatting the picture or perhaps also, the phone.

Is this the iPhone’s first public appearance on national television in both Australia and New-Zealand? Perhaps not the most exciting news all round, but questions now have to asked – who’s exactly is it? What plan is he/she using with it? How long have they had it and how did they get it? Perhaps he bought it when “Rove” did two shows in the US.

It was just one of the “cool” moments i had to share with y’all.

But i’ve installed Leopard, how could this be? What’s going on here? Why don’t i know the joys of bringing deleted files back from the dead and forgoing the dread of file loss? 

Because Time Machine is being real… a real fuck stick really! Twice it has almost backed up my HDD completely, but then come up with some error.

The last two times it’s started to backup, it says it can’t find the drive. Great.

Well i’m glad that in that wasted time my laptop’s hard drive hasn’t packed it in! Or i’d be rooted! (Well, i do have that other back up i made for when i installed Leopard, but not the point!) 

What a let down. I’d just been complaining to Jase a few days ago that every backup program i’d used had crashed on me, and so Time Machine was to be my saviour. But now i’m going to be the one to try and do the saving. To save me. 

In fairness, it could be that my ext hard drive is about to pack it in. Better now than a month down the road too! I ran ‘Repair Disk’ and i got this wonderful message from the OS X gods… 

Do ya see that? What i named my ext hdd?… Geddit? Clever hey! I bet there have been a number of geeks patting themselves on their backs for that one. Comment us if you’re another great mind that thought alike…

Dan and I journeyed to our local Australian Apple Store this evening and were nearly met with a rousing applause.

The install went smoothly, thought the damn thing seemed to take longer ‘verifying the disc’ than actually installing the thing. If you’re in a rush, I certainly see no harm in skipping the verify step. If you are installing a family pack on multiple computers and are cool like me, then I would definitely recommend skipping this lengthy time-waster.

My first impressions are thus:

• The whole install process is so breezy, it really has been perfected.
• Spotlight flies like an absolute bitch! Amazing! On my MacBook Pro it took about half an hour to build the library and was off and racing. It automatically highlights the top entry now, a nice change.
• Sleep/wake times on the MacBooks are the same
• There’s no ‘Loading OS’ screen per-say, it just gets it straight on! Sexy.
• The Airport menu loads instantly, at last!
• Time Machine most certainly backs up over the Airport Extreme Base Station, providing you perform your initial backup with your external HDD connected to your mac, and then when connected to your Airport, manually logon to it once through Finder and set it to remember the password.
• The new side-panel of Finder is brilliant. .Mac is enabled by default, but that can be pissed off through the settings pretty easily.
• Safari feels snappier. Really. It’s out of BETA finally, too. I’m going to try and make the switch over from Firefox one last time. Firefox runs like an absolute dog for some reason, too. All the more reason to go Safari.
• I’m not entirely sure what to think of the new translucent menus, or gratuitous use of drop-shadow. I’ll sleep on that one.
• All the Help menus have been rehashed, to better serve the kind of people who click on them.
• Screen capture gives feedback for the exact pixel that you are hovering over. Awww.
• Time Machine is a handsome bitch.

I’ll certainly add more as it comes up. But on the whole, this is one of those upgrades that doesn’t smack you in the face with joy straight away, but instead gently flicks marbles at you until you realise that all-in-all, it is actually freaking awesome. I think I might sleep in my free Leopard tshirt.

Geared up for the long waiting line at the Apple store, along with the patented Apple buzz and anticipation, Daniel and Jason were in for something rather different…

Time for some first person narration. Jason took to the wheel of his BMW, and money in hand, we took off into the sunset to get ourselves some sexy spots.

One of the first there! Excellent. That meant that we were the geekiest of the geeks around. Ready to line up to purchase a computer operating system, and prompt.

So we lined up next to the man in the red monkey suit, who had audio equipment there with him. Leopard Sir? No? Oh okay. Lemme guess… Busking? Failed Australian Idol contestant looking to make a comeback in front of a group of mac fans? Perhaps running some Karaoke to warm up the voices for when we cheered “Shit yeah! Six o’clock! Die Windows!”.

He told us he was there to help let people know, the action was here. Fair enough!

But hang on, where was the line of people leading a mile down the footpath from the store? Hmm. Something was up. Was it Friday today? Yep, definitely Friday.

Maybe everyone was jam packed inside? Inside we go to find out!

…

Chapter 2.

(Third person) Daniel timedly stepped over the threshold and took in his surroundings… Jason jumped through the doorway and shouted “Woohoo!”. And… And… More after the break.

(What’s with the break thingy? Back to first person.) Silence. There was practically silence. No one even looked around to see who the enthusiastic youth “wooting” was, let alone give him a huge cheer!

Sadly enough, we took the total number of patrons up to about four.

WTF?!? WTH!?! WTFWGOH? There’s a singing monkey out the front, big Leopard signs up in the window, but more macs in the room than people! Damn! What a let down!

And what else was a little disconcerting, perhaps more so than the lack of mac fans was that the other patrons in the store consisted of one teen geek, and middle aged men who’d stopped masturbating over images cut out of the Womans Weekly long enough to come and pick up a copy of Leopard to pull off over. Sorry guys. No lingerie models in that Leopard manual.

But i kid. We were no better than them, and they no better than us. We were all present for a common purpose. And so the countdown began, counting down (in our heads) and on the computer screens.

To fill in the time until we had to fight our way in front of four, no five now, pale Caucasians, we had a wander round the store. And what is this i saw! I thought Sennheiser was generally a pretty groovy outfit, with some really nice products… But what was this? A bad German translation? Or just a really bad attempt to get some teenage purchases?

And thanks to that stylish PC tool for modeling that package wonderfully.

At 5:55pm, the gang of mac fans were surprised with an early treat of Leopard savouries. One of the staff members booted up an iMac with Apple’s retail demo installation of Leopard – complete with John Appleseed and co. populating the Address Book.

The staff member gave a little bit of a demo of cover flow in the Finder and a few other token things like Stacks and that.

Then the geek contingent very diplomatically took a few mouse clicks in turn. I watched on as another enthusiastic youth got his jollies.

No porn was loaded on this computer, so Jason decided to entertain the crowd with some sexy dancing.

And as if that wasn’t entertaining enough, our red friend outside started up some fun of his own!

I wasn’t too far off when i joked to him about doing karaoke either. He busted out a saxa-ma-phone and got tootin’ alongside some backing tracks! Pure gold.

Surely the Mac fans would now come in droves!!…

Okay, so Leopard time was… 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, finally here!

Everyone politely lined up (Airport Extreme in Jason’s arm) and purchased their copy of Leopard. Non-event!

But what was super cool was the hologram on the box! You gotta see it in person. Really cool!

Oh yeah! And we each got a Leopard t-shirt. Rather shit actually! Bit of a let down, but free, so who cares. If it was one of those cool retro changes-colour-with-heat t-shirts, that would have made it just-pissed-higher-than-my-body-height! cool.

So into the car and off home to install the thing!

And so what did Jason and i learn from this whole experience?

I think it would be that if you are looking for a great OS X purchasing experience, don’t expect it in Australia. Go to America.

(Did anyone have a more exciting experience at one of the city stores in the land of Oz?)

We’ll get back to you on how Leopard panned out for us! Happy installing, all!

And thank the lord for the iPhone Elite team! This week they came up with a method to re-virginise sim-unlocked 1.0.2, and further more, rather than users having to screw ’round in the terminal they put together an automated process(es) which makes the whole ordeal rather damn simple!

And even better, i can attest to the fact that it works! So if you indulge in some re-virginising goodness, be sure to donate some moola to these fine folks, allowing international peoples like mwa to enjoy the benefits of 1.1.1, and use of the iPhone as just that, a phone.

After i’d revirginised, i then followed this guide where it details upgrading from a re-virginised 1.0.2 iPhone to 1.1.1, and further more unlocking your updated iPhone. Thanks so much to the iPhone Dev Team for that beautiful solution, anySIM.

For those interested, i’ve posted some photo’s from my re-virginising escapades…

I definitely decided to run with the auto install that also facilitates a backup of your seczone – good stuff in-case things go apple shaped. Oh, and don’t forget to install MobileTerminal via AppTapp before you start so you can have some terminal access to kick off the virginiser, if you want some cool green text action like i got (and in case things go wrong).

“Yes please”. Or just “Yes”, as i typed in. Manors aren’t required in terminal land.

And another “yes” to forge ahead with the risky business. At this stage i pretended i was calm and cool. All was going well. Just say yes and don’t ask question. No shit in the pants yet.

And all is done! My iPhone was ready to be upgraded, then laid horizontal again to make it function in the land Down Under. Awesome!

Virgin tastic.

I almost did shit myself when i saw that unread text message up the top there. I freaked that the re-lock had been unsuccessful and that i’d just received a new message. Buuuut i eventually realised that not only does iTunes backup your contacts etc, it also backs up your text messages, your clock alarms, ringtones etc and background picture! Very nice. Pants still dry.

Whilst upgrading to 1.1.1 via iTunes, i came across a fantastic error, which made the iPhone display… nothing. It was a blanket of grey. Oh oh… Is this what it’s like in bricked heaven? I’ve come to so far! I’m not ready to die yet!…

But thankfully re-trying the upgrade was successful.

God i love anySIM. That lock logo is the sorta sexy that makes me want to dress up like a woman and “pick myself up at a bar type-thing” in the mirror.

And just like that, BOOM! Yes Optus away! Like having a brand new phone. Double home key click and double space bar here i come! And iTunes store, too, i guess.

Now do i take ‘50 more steps’ to install apptapp now? Or wait ’till simpler GUI version is created…

I go and buy an expensive new external HDD and the new Airport Extreme Base Station, only to find out that to my horror Apple look to have pulled the support for wireless backups!

Last week the Apple website told us this:

“Effortless meets wireless.
With a hard disk connected to your AirPort Extreme Base Station, all the Macs in your house can use Time Machine to back up wirelessly. Simply select your AirPort Disk as the backup disk for each computer and the whole family can enjoy the benefits of Time Machine.”

Now we get a whole lot of this:

“Pick a disk. Any disk.
You can designate just about any HFS+ formatted FireWire or USB drive connected to a Mac as a Time Machine backup drive. Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices.”

Without any of this:

“a hard disk connected to your AirPort Extreme Base Station”

Apple’s 300 leopard features page is disturbingly absent of any wireless Time Machine action, too.

But then ‘listrophy’ of Digg alerted me to this:

So what’s it going to be, Apple?

Is this a way of saying ‘nuh-uh’ to wireless backups, or are just putting other features first?

My thinking is that wireless backups is way too-cool a feature to not be touting. Perhaps it works, but not terribly well at the moment, so they are avoiding a backlash by never actually saying it’s a go to begin with!

All will be revealed tomorrow in any case, when I line up to what is bound to be a lack of line at the Australian leopard launch. Australia just hasn’t quite mastered its Apple mayhem yet.

We will keep you posted.

It went something like, “You cannot open more than eight pages in Safari. Go use a proper computer to get the most full Internet browsing experience”.

Well i didn’t know there was such a restriction. And why?

Does it slow down Safari if you have too many pages open at once? Does it make Safari or even the whole iPhone unstable?

Perhaps the number eight is simply Steve Jobs favourite number. Or the number of days one of Steve Jobs weeks contains.

store.apple.com

Apple are expected to announce the release date and time for leopard. At first we thought this might be typical maintenance, but when we saw that it’s worldwide, we thought otherwise!

At least this means that we won’t have to go through another Stevenote just to find out when Leopard will be launched. Let’s get some sweet Halloween Cat Action!

UPDATE: Well there you have it! Leopard 6pm on 26th October. Apple are offering free delivery on the 26th, which sounds verrry nice, though rural areas can wait up to two days for delivery.

I wish there was an easier way to find out what they classify as rural!

How cool is this! What could be called our ’sister site’, (if you think long and hard about their title) HardMac has pointed out a little ‘feature’ of sorts on the iPhone, that most phones have, too.

At the bottom of the jack plug you can see a white disc that will irreversibly change color when entering in contact with water. So one would not need to open an iPhone or an iPod Touch to ensure it stopped working due to an unexpected bath.

The reason i thought this is cool is ’cause… Well i’m a bit of a geek i guess. But recently i had a bit of ‘plant’ stuck in the headphone jack (i take my iPhone outdoors when working). And whilst poking around in the headphone jack with a pin to get out the foreign plant, i was intrigued by the little white thing at the bottom of the headphone jack.

It didn’t look like part of a typical headphone jack – it wasn’t copper or even metal coloured, so it didn’t look like a typical electrical conductor of any sort, and now i know what the hell it is.

Now if my iPhone was under an Australian warrantee, i’d probably be a little frightened by the positioning of the water indicator. In other phones the indicator is typically near the battery or on the battery, tucked away inside the case of the phone. Partially removed from light rain or urine.

But given i have my iPhone sitting in a little side pocket on my pants (which can be a little open to the weather) i’d be paranoid about keeping my iPhone headphone jack down in that pocket. I wouldn’t want to void the chance of my iPhone being serviced by an Apple technician if the water indicator had been triggered by a lousy drop of rain (or an accidental splash!).

I am so righteous and free right now about having an unsupported iPhone…

1. The ability to send “business cards” to other phone via sms.

2. Save sms drafts.

3. To be able to choose other routes when mapping from A to B in google maps on the iPhone.

Although being interviewed more specifically on the now controversial shutdown of Australia’s CDMA mobile network in favour of faster ‘Next-G’ technologies, the inevitable iPhone question was raised.

O’Beirne willingly confirmed for listeners that Telstra were in fact “looking at it (the iPhone)” and did not expect to know who (which network) would host it “for a few months.”

Surprising news, considering the last we heard from Telstra on the iPhone was that they thought Apple should “stick to their knitting,” as Telstra’s 2ic, Greg Winn so eloquently put it just a month after the device was announced in January this year.

O’Beirne spoke very positively of the applications of the device, but raised the lack of 3G support as a concern. A statement like this indicates that either O’Beirne isn’t quite in the iPhone loop, or was just trying take the attention off it. Steve Jobs announced in January and again at the iPhone’s Europe launch that the iPhone would eventually support 3G. Virgin Mobile are in fact already testing a limited number of 3G iPhone units in Sydney.

Does this mean that Apple are merely ‘dating’ a number of mobile carriers in Australia, testing the iPhone on various networks and frequencies. Or is Telstra trying to still sound like a key player, even though the deal may be signed elsewhere.

Knowing the nature of Apple’s mobile carrier negotiations in both the US and Europe, it becomes impossible to draw any hard conclusions about which network will host the iPhone in 2008. No doubt Telstra are interested in the device, now that they’ve actually seen it, and no doubt Apple are making them jump through hoops to prove their devotion.

What we can take from this is that the Australian iPhone may only be a matter of months away, regardless of whether it’s on Telstra’s 2.5 (EDGE) network, its Next-G network or Virgin Mobile’s 3G network as the iPhone is being tested currently.

As I hear it, Myspace is old hat, and Facebook is where it’s at. Who am I to contradict? Yesterday I set myself up a nice little account, added my photo and began the laborious task of wasting time.

My first faux-pas was that I inadvertently invited my entire Gmail address book to be my friend. Yes. Friends. Work colleagues. People who I sent hate mail to and maintained their address ‘for the record’. Everyone.

Oh well, I’ll just retract those invites won’t I?

Nope. No can do, says Facebook.

So I delete my account and make a new one, to find that Facebook is yet again one step ahead, and has kindly preserved all my settings and pending friend requests. Super.

I contacted Facebook about this and will report on my findings. In the meantime, I guess I’m just going to have to keep a close eye on that ‘friend’ list!

I am a little amazed at how much is tracked by this thing: appearances in other people’s photos, how I met people, what I say about them. How gay I am or aren’t.

I get a little freaked out by all this, so I’ve been hunting through the privacy options, turning pretty much everything to off. I found a fantastic little article called How to use Facebook without loosing your job, all about protecting your privacy on Facebook, which that I found rather enlightening. Do check it out!

And I’m of course not saying that I’m anti-sharing. I just don’t want freaks and future-employers seeing my nudie runs.

Full disclosure: Jason has never nudie-ran.

Update: Facbook has this to say about my pradicament:

“Unfortunately there is no way to retract a friend request. In circumstances where you may have invited a person who you would not like to become your friend, your first option is to remove the person from your friend list as soon as they accept your request.”

Hats off to Facebook for that nugget of a policy.

I accidentally type a word spelt totally wrong, hit space, and Boom – straight into the dictionary. Meaning that the next time i try to type that word again, the spastic version of the word i added to the dictionary accidentally is suggested as what i might want to type, instead of the proper spelling of the word!

Is there a file on the iPhone that stores that info that could be edited?? I think i’m gonna go huntin’ for wabbits.

Update:

Mother fucker! Just got a text message on my iPhone asking for someone elses phone number. But i couldn’t see an immediate way to text back with that info, without writing the number in question down with a pen first, or viewing it on my laptop which happens to be in front of me. On every  phone i’ve used, this is

With every other dumb-arse phone i’ve used i could just send a contact’s ph number via sms texting as a “Business Card” or the like.

If you, dear reader, were making a new phone, wouldn’t you look at the current line of phone’s and think, “Hey! That’s a great idea that i’d want in the ‘ideal phone’. Let’s put that small but handy feature in our new cool awesome phone.” But no.

iPhone number two’s or even just a new software update has a lot it could be.

You may or may not have already changed the default phone number format on your iPhone from the default American set to a more international standard.

If you’ve done this by replacing the ‘US’ value in the PhoneFormats file with that of your own country, you may have noticed that Apple’s interpretation of how your local numbers should look isn’t quite what you had in mind!

I certainly did, so instead of copying the default set of Australian values into the US spot, I pasted in the following:

04## ### ###
+6# ### ### ###
(03) #### ####
(08) #### ####
(02) #### ####
9### ####
8### ####
5### ####
1#00 ### ###

Now iPhone can tell the difference between a mobile number and a home number with an area code present!

Of course this list serves me well, for a Victorian, however you may feel free to make changes to suit your own locality. For those international visitors, play around with mixing hash signs with numbers in order to get the desired effect.

Using the Address Book as a testing ground is a great time saver.

Additionally, I ended up keeping all these filters into my Mac’s Address Book for smooth Australian action everywhere!

How to change iPhone’s default number format – a recap

If you need a recap on how to modify the number formats on your iPhone, here’s a quick summary, thanks to the numerous excellent iPhone blogs such as modmyiphone and hackint0sh:

Using SFTP (which you would have installed using iNdependance and instructions like this when you unlocked your iPhone), retrieve from your iPhone the file:

/System/Library/Frameworks/AddressBookUI.framework/ABPhoneFormats.plist in 1.0.x

or, /System/Library/Frameworks/UIKit.f­ramework/Ph­oneFormats/UIPhoneFor­mats.plist in 1.1.1

Pop this file through this handy BINARY to ASCII converter, open with TextEdit and find the ‘US’ country value. Replace the values in it with those from your own country code (AU, for Australia) or even better, using your own customised version of the ones listed above.

Save and replace this file once again via SFTP, then restart your iPhone.

Viola! Now your iPhone speaks good fair dinkum Aussie, or German, or Spanish…

UPDATE: You may have noticed that your iPhone sometimes can’t quite tell the difference between phone numbers with and without area codes. This is because the firmware needs a little more ‘Australian’ tweaking to tell it that big long American phone numbers aren’t cool anymore. Find out about that one here.

“Yo bitches! Check this out!…”

See this iPhone i’ve got here? Here in my hands dumb ass. It’s been updated with some pretty kewl new features with software update 1.1.1.

Double clicking the home button now takes you straight to Hawaii. Steve and i now to lunch their on Tuesdays. He pays for my tomato Juice.

Also with this latest really great update, you can turn your house lights out!

See?

But a word of caution, do not try to insert the iPhone up your sphincter. It hurts. Okay, lights on.

Ooo! Steve, hey, stop it… Hey, where’d you come from? We’re recording. …He he! That tickles…

Well okay, but hurry up! I gotta take that Zune from outa my ass, i think it’s finished. They don’t make the brown ones anymore and i’m trying to capture that market with my home modified…

Actually, I think… Yep. Ahhhh….. That’d been up there for fourteen days straight.

All clear!

Thank you.

They even give a phone number to call if typed words just cannot describe your tale!

Maybe you might like to write in and tell them how great it is that your modded iPhone won’t work anymore, or all that time you saved by cutting and pasting your text?

I’ve no doubt they’ll get some great stories out of it, and in many ways, rightly so.

I dare someone to make up a super-fantastic story about how the iPhone saved your grandma or something to see if they follow up on it!

I’m just scrubbing the stains out of my pants now.

For such an advanced and supposedly intuitive system, I was genuinely surprised at all that clutter!

Yes, I’m talking about poo stains.

It was certainly very pretty. Very pretty. However the way that it asked me if I ‘really wanted to visit the web address’ that I had just typed in really blew my mind.

And Norton Internet Security is just made for Vista. Its 30px high, screen-wide, glossy yellow “EVERYTHING IS FUCKING OK SO DON’T PANIC” notification bar above all my pages is certainly a real comfort.

No wonder the box shows an anal retentive PC user hugging his computer like there’s no tomorrow.

But hey, at least its staying true to the literal meaning of toolbar.

He commented that it’s all good that it shows you when and where to make turns to get to your destination, but you’re still going to be fiddling around with your phone (no doubt whilst still driving) to check out the next turn you’ve got to make. Such a distraction whilst driving will likely render you and your car dead or at least really really awake, sooner or later (as happened to me the other day!!.. Another story for our next podcast).

So it makes a lot of sense to have your iPhone read your directions out aloud to you. The iPhone runs some form of OS X doesn’t it? And OS X on our computers contains the Speech function doesn’t it?

Select a bit of text, go to Services in the applications menu and hit Speech, Start Speaking Text, and a lovely man or woman reads your text for you, with an air of Stephen Hawking, but less intelligence. Just you ask the Speech application to cook you up an egg in a black hole for you! Only Stephen supplies the goods, whilst out on a camping trip. (Is that an inappropriate joke?)

So you’re driving along and, “Oh oh! Where to now?”. You hit a button on the iPhone, and a voice reads out your next direction… You one step ahead of me? Let’s run that scenario again.

So you’re driving along, with your 2nd gen iPhone sitting attentively on the passenger seat next to you and you think, “Oh oh, Where to now?”. You speak out loud “Next direction”. Voice recognition goes “Oh shit! Umm, Speech thingy! Read out next direction.” And Speech thingy does it’s work. You now know to turn left at the brothel, 500 metres on your left.

It’s old news i found out (speech recognition that is). In 2006 Apple had a U.S. patent approved for speech recognition technology. Read about it here.

In fact all this seems so obvious now that i’ll be disappointed if they don’t add speech recognition and talking into the next revision of the iPhone (along with video recording capabilities etc etc etc).

What else do you think they would be smart to add to the 2nd gen iPhone, that hasn’t already been banged on about?

So the iPhone kicks butt as far as pre-saving map data in the cache goes.

When you’re at home on your wifi, you can preload all the map lovin’ that you can handle to save yourself downloading it over EDGE (or GPRS on Australia’s Virgin network! Rock on!) when you’re on the road and need those directions pronto!

What’s equally supurb is the way that the Maps App handles routing directions.

If you plug in two locations to check out where you’re heading off to (I find I’m not so much using the Maps while driving, but more to suss out the journey before I leave home), while you’re on your speedy wifi, then iPhone automatically pre-loads all the intersections into its memory.

Even the iPhone knows how bad EDGE/GPRS speeds are, and tries to save you the download time!

So if you’re planning a trip, be sure to pop all this in before you leave home and the maps will be hot to trot before you’ve even tied your shoes.

Of course this has little bearing for me, as I’ve pretty much already cached-up ever square metre of my state at every detail level anyway! No, I am not a nerd!

I wouldn’t have to do this if the iPhone were 3G. But, well, that’s not till next year.

I’m unashamedly a big reader of Fake Steve. I like his slant on real-life news, and terrific ability to bag people out.

Often on this site, and many others like it, the author will link to numerous relevant and interesting pages as part of a blog entry.

On my Mac, I like to load these in seperate tabs while I continue reading the main thrust of the blog.

Have you tried opening a link in a new window on your iPhone yet? Unless the web developer lends you a helping hand, it can’t be done.

Enter Richard Herrera of Doctyper, with a genius workaround that will have you getting it on like there’s no tomorrow!

Click here to see his solution (not in a new window, I might add)

In a nutshell, you simply add two bookmarklets to the top of your boomkmarks menu (for easy access). One is called ‘Open in New Tab,’ while the other is aptly named ‘Open in Same Tab.’

If you want to load a link in a new ‘tab,’ just pop up the bookmarks menu and tap ‘Open in a New Tab,’ and automatically all the links on the page will be set to target=”_blank.” Tap the corresponding bookmarklet to revert the page to normal if desired.

So so simple! And to make matters even better, Safari keeps you in the loop by automatically putting a ‘new window’ icon beside all of the links.

This certainly has just made my day!

A bench clamp, a hacksaw and a 3.5 mm audio cable combined with a taste for adventure, delivered me my brand new iPhone certified cable!

Now my iPhone can enjoy the spendorous accoustics of my Daewoo Lanos, as I cruise the badass streets.

I think the cable has poignant beauty to rival the iPhone itself.

But seriously, seeing the amount of redundant excess plastic on something like this really does make you appreciate the minimalism of Apple design. We’ve all seen a lot fatter 3.5 mm adapters than this one, too!

Check check it.

Along with Jason, i too changed the scrolling carrier logo YES OPTUS.

Whilst he replaced his with “iPhone”, i went the slightly more ghetto approach to gain some street cred with all me homeboys and girls. And mum and dad. See below…

• the menu animation on my iPhone is noticably sluggish
• the screen brightness on my iPhone is dimmer than Dan’s
• my iPod and Safari crash a lot

A lot of other people have also reported that after a SIM unlock, the speaker volume drops as well.

What on earth?

It’s certainly looking like ye olde SIM unlock isn’t as pristine as we once thought!

The screen brightness drop isn’t something I have any idea about, but the chunky animation seemed like something fun to try and nut out.

After many wasted restore attempts and other efforts, I started to wonder if the lacking performance has anything to do with the absurdly long and equally ugly ‘YES OPTUS’ gracing the top of my screen.

Turns out that it did…

It seemed to make sense – unlike AT&T, or O2, iPhone is reading the Optus logo from the network each time it loads, rather than from a PNG image on the phone. Additionally, the software is then forced to scroll the carrier name because it doesn’t fit the gap (which occasionally caused some bizarre stretching and the like).

So at least in my mind, it looked like I’d found a possible way of getting performance back to how mother Jobs had first intended it to be, while satisfying my anal retentive tendencies.

Dan came across a great tutorial on how to rename the Optus carrier logo on the iPhone, which we set to work on pronto!

As iPhone does read from the network, it’s not as simple as swapping an image file over… Though you do get to put your own image in there once you’ve used a Hex editor to re-jig the springboard.

The result? After loads and loads of testing, I am confident to say that I think I have at least finally gotten rid of the sluggish animation! It is like a brand new iPhone once more!

Some people have still reported sluggishness even after a restore, however it is not stated whether they were using it on AT&T (image logo) or another network without an image.

So I’m happy. My saga of shitty animation looks to have come to an end.

Mind you, I should point out that I don’t have App Tapp installed on my iPhone, only custom number formats, You Tube and the SIM unlock. I think Dan went through a similar process without quite as much love, but he’s fully pimping it with the 3rd party apps, so that is perhaps a bit of a trade-off.

For what it’s worth, Safari hasn’t crashed on me as much either. Placebo?

I’m not sure if I could say the screen’s any brighter, however! I guess I’ll save that for another day!

Not just a pithy face? I mean, pretty?

I got an email from Scott Bourne! ‘Cause i had a go at him about something i thought he said on his podcast. He wrote back with an equal amount of un-pithyness, but alas – i hate to be wrong – and this time i was.

Time to write an apology! Hmm.

“I’ll never be negative! I’ll never be negative! I’ll never be negative!..” My new mantra.

But I blame the internet. And poptarts. They tasted sorta good? But really, they just burnt my tongue and tasted sorta bad…

Happiness comes in many packages. Mine came in this one (pictured).

Apart from the lady handing me over the package being a fan of Star Gate, it looked like my birthday had come. And it may as well have been my birthday, given the sausage surpise that awaited me behind the gimicky wrapping paper.

Here’s how to make sure your first iPhone experience is one to remember.

Step one.
You get your box.

Step two.
Take a shower to wash away the sins of the day from being around Window’s machines.

Step three.
Wear somethin pretty. Maybe a splash of cologne. You didn’t pay all that money just to fumble around like a bogan. Gotta look sharp.

Step four.
Manicure fingernails for ultimate touch experience. Don’t want any blood drawn in the heat of the night.

Step five.
Dim the lights. Put on some sexy keynote action from January 2007, to get you in the mood.

Step six.
Open the fricken box and stop blogging about it!

Amidst all the iPhone kafuffle taking place in Europe last week, it looks like us Aussies might also have something to celebrate!

Just this week we were privy to a leak that the iPhone is not only going to use 3G in Australia but is in fact already being tested on a Virgin Mobile’s 3G network.

Word so far is that the device is performing “very nicely.”

In Australia, Virgin are a virtual network roaming on Optus. Unfortunately for Australians, Optus doesn’t have half as much reception as the national carrier, Telstra, but can we really see Telstra sharing revenue? (no).

As expected, Apple are pushing for Visual Voicemail “like there’s no tomorrow,” and also of interest, Virgin testers are concerned about the security of the new device, with worries that hackers might reprogram the phone’s modem to circumvent bandwidth restrictions.

It is expected that a new firmware update from Apple will bolster the modem’s security and ease concerns at Virgin well before any such launch of the iPhone in Australia.

At the iPhone’s Europe launch, Steve Jobs called 3G handsets “power hogs” in a bid to justify the continued use of edge, though he initially hinted at a 3G version when first launched. Could this now just be a bid to throw people off the scent?

Using Virgin Mobile certainly adds up: A groovy new company for a hip new piece of technology. Though, given the nature of negotiations in both the U.S. and Europe, anything is fair game, and Apple may merely be putting out the feelers ahead of a 2008 launch.

What does seem promising is that the revision will a least do away the slower EDGE technology. Especially seeing 3G reigns supreme in Australia.

It is expected that the phone’s Australian launch will most likely coincide with a worldwide release of the 3G, 2nd-gen iPhone in 2008, no doubt in a bid to prevent a frenzy of Australian phones being unlocked and flogged overseas. (Imagine! Finally the Australians can get a chance to make some money back on eBay with this thing!)

Virgin’s current data packs (3ooMB for AU$10/month) are already the industry best in Australia, making them the obvious choice for Australian iPhone Hackers Anonymous.