Since the release of the 3G iPhone at WWDC last week, there are still many questions unanswered and speculation regarding the new iPhone.

This years WWDC keynote brought us the hotly anticipated 3G iPhone. Aggressively priced at $199, it is clear that Apple wants to take on the smartphone market and get iPhones in more hands this year. True to some rumors, the new iPhone is launching for $199 in 22 countries later next month. Thanks to subsidization by AT&T and the other official iPhone carriers in other countries, Apple was able to cut the price of the iPhone in half.

While this is ultimately a win-win situation for both AT&T and Apple, it could cause some consumers headaches. One of the greatest parts of the iPhone started with the privilege to activate at home through iTunes. This slick implementation of Apple’s existing software allowed for consumers to avoid the hassle of activating your phone in the store- and for Apple employees to quickly sell more iPhones, Macs or iPods.

Although it is still preliminary speculation at this point, it seems that because of the subsidization, In-Store activation is going to be required. This means that if you want to buy an iPhone, you must purchase the phone and activate in the store regardless if you’re in an AT&T store or an Apple Store. During busy times, such as the holiday season or during launch day, July 11th, this could mean many Apple Store employees being tied up with activating iPhones instead of helping other customers with Mac or iPod sales- which just leaves both sides aggravated.

It also means that the unlocked market is going to suffer. Because Apple gave consumers the liberty to purchase the hardware without any binding contract, many people took their iPhones onto other GSM networks such as T-Mobile. It is believed that over 500,000 iPhones have been unlocked and brought onto other networks around the world. This time around, because AT&T is paying for a portion of the iPhone hardware, requiring immediate, ins-store activation would make sense to further deter these people from bringing the iPhone to other networks.

However, some theorize that since Apple already requires a credit card for an iPhone purchase, they could charge AT&T’s subsidization amount back to their card if the phone wasn’t activated within a certain period of time. This could allow Apple to continue to activate phones through iTunes, but keep AT&T from loosing money.

Because there hasn’t been any official announcement, theoretically, we won’t know for certain until there is. The iPhone 3G is set to launch on July 11th. If you can’t wait, check out our new dashboard widget. Stay tuned for more information regarding the launch and launch coverage of the new 3G iPhone here at theiLife.com.

Guest poster Dan Foy from Macsimum News gives us an overview of Growl. You can read his original post here on Macsiumum News!

You’re working on a project at work, and you hear the “bing” of Mail, telling you there’s a new e-mail. You are confronted with the question, “Do I stop what I’m doing and see if the e-mail is important, or do I take a chance and keep working on my project?”

What if you didn’t have to? What if a little box popped up on the side of your screen with a summary of the e-mail, giving you a short-term look at the e-mail so you can decide if it’s important or not?
Believe it or not, the software that does that is already here. And it’s free (donations are accepted).
It’s called Growl. Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X: it allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications (took the description right off their web site because I couldn’t have said it better myself).

I had heard of Growl, but didn’t see much use for it until I accidentally installed it. Yes, I accidentally installed Growl. I don’t even know what program installed it for me (which I don’t like, but I seem to recall an installer asking me if I wanted to install Growl, so I must have said “yes.”)
Anyway, all of a sudden, I started seeing notifications when my RSS reader, the open-source Vienna, downloaded new articles. Thought that was pretty handy. I could tell when there were new articles without bumping down to the bottom of the screen and making the dock appear (Vienna has a number notifier in its dock icon and I keep my dock hidden). Saves time.
So I started investigating and found Growl in my System Preferences (in the Other category at the bottom). After some exploration, I found that there is a plugin for Apple’s Mail program that allows Growl to notify you of new e-mail.

And there are a whole bunch of other programs that are either written to work with Growl, and for some others there are plugins.

But the one that really helps me is the Mail plugin. My day job is at a newspaper. I do page design for my home paper and tech support for several other papers. As part of that, I get an enormous amount of e-mail from the Associated Press. Most of if deals with their web-based video network, and for some reason, they can’t just send me the important stuff, they send me an email every time they post a new video.

I have them whisked off to a folder in Mail, but it “bing”s every time one of those e-mails come in and I don’t always have time to see whether or not it’s important. But I want to know immediately if someone is having a problem related to their deadlines.
Growl shows me who the email is from and allows me to more-easily ignore the AP stuff.
And that’s just one example. I also use Semulov, which unmounts volumes. Now when a volume unmounts, I see it in a Growl notification.
I’m sure you can come up with many other uses, but I just wanted to introduce you to this cool little program.

For those of us who are counting down every last second until the 3G iPhone launch, we have got a new Dashboard widget for you! This widget is styled after the new iPhone 3G, and comes in two colors- Black and White. More details of the coverage from the iPhone 3G launch coming soon, but for now- get yours today!

Download iPhone 3G Countdown Widget (Black) [332KB]
Download iPhone 3G Countdown Widget (White) [332KB]

This article is a brief look into the latest version of the messaging program Adium.

If you aren’t already familiar with Adium, and you are running OS X- please download it now. Adium is basically the VLC of Instant Messaging applications- the swiss army knife that does it all, and with style. Completely Cocca based, licensed under a GNU General Public License, Adium is free and even highly customizable.

The Adium team, headed by Evan Schoenberg (Lead Developer) and Eric Richie (Project Manager) has been rapidly developing the latest version of Adium- version 1.3. Still in beta form, Adium 1.3 features a number of improvements over the current 1.2.5 build. Some of the best are highlighted below:

Complete redesign of the Contact Inspector (formerly the Get Info Window)

The contact inspector and integration with Address Book has been greatly improved in Adium 1.3.

Added Facebook Chat service to Adium

The new Facebook Chat protocol is now supported in Adium version 1.3.

Added a search field to the Standard Contact List window

Alike the new Contact search in the upcoming iPhone 2.0 firmware, Adium now supports searching your contacts, both online and off. Simply click in the Buddy List window and start typing- your results will be instantly filtered.

Major performance improvements, most notable when signing on multiple accounts simultaneously and when chatting while other applications are making heavy use of your hard drive.

Adium 1.3 has indeed been improved and most notably on older machines where system resources are tight.

If you would like to update to Adium 1.3 now, download Adium 1.2.5; and in Adium>Preferences>General check “Update to Beta Versions when Available”. This will allow you to run the latest betas of Adium, and the final release when it comes out.

There are few target audiences that Apple’s products fail to appeal to these days, but one market they have yet to tap is the growing legion of digital gaming fans. Since Microsoft’s buyout of Bungie Studios in 2000, there have been few games for Apple fans to look forward to, excluding the valiant efforts of dedicated Mac exclusive developer Pangaea and cross platform games from developer Blizzard Entertainment. Steve Jobs continues to remain seemingly uncooperative with the game industry, rejecting an offer from PC mega-developer Valve to port its Half-Life 2 series to OS X.

But when Apple announced its ambitious touch screen iPhone device in early 2007, many gamers hoped that Apple would break into the mobile gaming market. The device seemed to be ideal for game design, featuring a large bright screen, input in the form of a touch screen and accelerometer, a 3D acceleration chip and the ability to download games from anywhere with cellular reception. Also, by entering the market four years after the release of the Nintendo DS and the PSP, the iPhone will have a substantial technical advantage over its competition. The PSP uses a 333 MHz CPU, the DS uses two co-processers, clocked at 67 and 33 MHz, where the iPhone utilizes a 620 MHz ARM chip. The iPhone has similar advantages in terms of RAM, storage and wireless capabilites. In fact, the only thing holding the Apple device back is its less than ideal input capabilites.

After repeatedly denying that they would allow 3rd party software development for an entire year, Apple confirmed that they would open the device up to developers, subsequently causing a flood of speculation into the prospects for gaming on the device. The first demonstrations of the iPhone’s gaming abilities were promising to say the very least. At Apple’s iPhone SDK announcement in March, Apple engineers demonstrated the capabilities of the platform with their internally developed game titled Touch Fighter, a Rouge Squadron/StarFox like flight combat sim. The game utilized the touch screen for aiming/shooting, the accelerometer for direction, and was fully 3D, even utilizing the OpenAL API to perform a limited 3D sound function. Mega-publisher EA, who had previously committed to develop more games for the Mac platform, demonstrated a mobile version of the first stage of its upcoming Spore franchise. And Sega showed off a build of Super Monkey Ball, making good use of the accelerometer, a control scheme that had gained much acclaim on the Nintendo Wii system. Apple and the other developers that had time with the SDK claimed that some of these applications, such as SMB had been developed in a period as short as just two weeks. The demonstration was a success; anticipation for iPhone games became frenzied.

During the past week at WWDC, iPhone gaming came back into the spotlight. Apple demonstrated numerous games, including additions from Pangaea Software in the form of two ports: the puzzle game Enigmo, and a port of its cult classic title Cro-Mag Rally. Moo Cow Music presented a suite of instrument simulations in an application called Band, featuring a virtual drum set, guitar, bass, keyboard and multi-function blues simulator. Band also allows for a number of recording features and the ability to combine tracks from multiple recordings, putting it several steps ahead of more casual games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

But the real test will come once developers start to push the iPhone 2.0 platform into the same arena as the DS and PSP game systems. Vying for the hardcore gamer market is not something that any mobile phone system has been successful in doing as of yet, despite the efforts of Nokia’s N-Gage platform. Enter Digital Legends Entertainment, formerly one of the few N-Gage exclusive developers. Their entry into the iPhone foray is the platform exclusive Kroll, a third person sidescroller title that bears some resemblance to God of War, to which the developer has compared Kroll to.

Resting the fate of the iPhone’s hardcore gaming potential on an untried N-Gage developer isn’t exactly fair however. To fill that niche steps in John Carmack of iD, who has promised that his studio will create an iPhone title. As of now, no commercial titles have been confirmed, but several videos have popped up of Doom 3/Doom Arena running on iPhone hardware. As if that wasn’t enough, a multi-player, networked version has also been demonstrated. There’s no question that the level of graphical prowess is rapidly approaching that of mainstream mobile game systems, but whether or not the iPhone can successfully emulate the gameplay of a dedicated gaming device remains to be seen.

Apple has a real chance to get gaming right this time around, let’s only hope they have what it takes. If you liked this article and would like to read more about iPhone gaming, check out our guide of upcoming iPhone games.

With 26 days until the launch of iPhone 2.0 , we have a whole extra month to check out what the future has in store. Below, we’ve compiled a guide to all of the games that are headed for the App Store.

EA – Spore

SimCity and The Sims creator Will Wright’s next big thing, with a development cycle rivaling that of the construction of the Great Pyramids. The full game has been heralded as the second coming of gaming, featuring a heavy emphasize on user created content, and procedural generation. It has been announced for the PC, Mac (via a Cider port) and a variety of console platforms, notably the Nintendo DS. Both the iPhone and DS versions appear to be a faithful recreation of nothing but the first stage of the game, in which the player controls a microscopic version of his future creature, that build that foundation for the rest of the players evolution.
Demo at Apple SDK announcement
Additional info

SEGA – Super Monkey Ball

A puzzle platformer that made its debut as an arcade game, it’s wild success made it a good choice as a launch title on the GameCube, Super Monkey Ball and its sequels have become a staple of the child focused console game market. The game has featured multiplayer since it’s release on the GameCube, the existence of a multiplayer feature for the iPhone version of the game, has as of yet, been unconfirmed. However, the control scheme is very similar to that of the Wii title, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz, in which the Wiimote is held parallel to the ground and tilted in the direction the player wishes to move.
Keynote Demo
Interview with SEGA’s Ethan Einhorn
Additional info

Pangaea – Enigmo and Cro-Mag Rally

Long time Mac exclusive developer Pangaea has added two of its most popular games to the foray. Enigmo is a puzzle game, in which players must manipulate the movement of an unknown liquid into a tank, using items such as bumpers, sliders, accelerators, and sponges. Cro-Mag Rally is a third person racing game, not unlike Mario Kart, in which players race through different periods in ancient history. The Mac version features networked multi-player, though this feature is unconfirmed for the iPhone build.
Additional Info
Developer Website

GameLoft – Multiple

GameLoft is rapidly becoming the EA of the mobile phone gaming market. Based out of France, the company has over 4,000 employees and posted a revenue of $140 million in 2007. Though the company mainly develops games for the Java, BREW and Symbian platforms, the company has announced plans to publish no fewer than 15 titles for the iPhone. The details posted so far suggest that GameLoft will stick to its strengths and develop mostly casual titles.
Brain Challenge
Chess and Backmaggon
Solitaire
Bubble Bash

Int13 – Crazy Cart 2

Another French mobile developer, Int13 has created a slick cart racing title for the iPhone. Rather than use tilt controls for movement like most developers, Int13 has opted for a multitouch steering wheel. A step in the right direction if you ask us; until the accuracy of the iPhone accelerometer is proven, our guess would be that it’s going to be fairly unreliable for accurate controls.
Announcment at MacRumors
Video Demo on YouTube

iD – Doom 3, Doom Arena

John Carmack of iD game was one of the first game developers to openly declare his frustration with Apple’s 3rd party apps quarantine, back in the summer of ’07. The announcement of the SDK however seems to have filled his heart with warm fuzzy joy, and has hinted that he may be working on a title for the iPhone. In a post on Slashdot (http: SLASH SLASH www.Slashdot DOT com… hehe) Carmack wrote “…The ability to distribute larger applications than the over-the-air limits and effectively market your title with more than a dozen character deck name, combined with the reasonable income split make this look like a very interesting market.”
Re:Mr. Carmack are you still around?
Quake 3 Arena ported to iPhone/iPod Touch

Digital Legends Entertainment – Kroll

This N-Gage developer gained loads of positive press at WWDC last week with their demonstration of third person sidescroller Kroll. Following in the footsteps of Ready At Dawn’s God of War, this title promises to bring a hardcore gaming flare to a market that so far has seen mostly casual titles. Thank the gods Jobs decided to let these guys on stage rather than yet another “casual” title like say…

PopCap Games – Bejeweled, Zuma and Peggle

Surprising many, Peggle’s release in February of last year yielded a firestorm of critical acclaim and mainstream success. The addictive arcade title lets players choose one of ten playable characters as they try to clear 55 stages of peg destroying madness. The game received several awards, and was named one of the Top 5 most addictive computer games of all time by MSNBC. In an Apple press release, PopCap CEO confirmed that his company was developing multiple titles for the iPhone, including Peggle
Peggle for iPhone confirmed
Apple press release

Namco – PacMan

Ah PacMan, where would we be without you? This arcade legend has defined the gaming industry for decades, and has been ported to almost every kind of electronic device ever made. It is fitting then, that Namco would jump at the chance to add yet another check on its list of platforms supported. Like PopCap, Namco pledged its support in Apple’s press release following its iPhone SDK announcement, confirming both PacMan and Galaga for the App Store.
Namco, PopCap, THQ Pledge iPhone Support

IG Fun – Re-Volt and BioShock

Nothing good can come of a developer most comfortable making crappy licensed games on the BREW platform, getting the rights to horribly rape publish the 2007 Game of the Year, BioShock. IG Fun has already revealed their plans to make a BREW version of the game, but revealed to Pocket Gamer that they had plans to develop an iPhone version. Though they have yet to show any footage of the game, the developer has demonstrated an internally developed game called Re-Volt on the iPhone that looks like an unintuitively controlled Unreal set game, with enemies that have animations uncomfortably similar to the spider Splicers from BioShock.
Latest on BioShock Mobile
Re-Volt first-person shooter for iPhone
IG Fun’s Official Website

This list was compiled through research on the internet. As we uncover more information, we will bring it to you. However, if you know of a developer or game we missed, or would like to tell us more about your game, please contact us!

The WebKit devs are at it again, announcing a flurry of information about a new JavaScript interpreter called SquirrelFish, and revealing a little over a week later that this would set the tone for development of WebKit 4 and Safari 4.

SquirrelFish is “a register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention”, that promises vastly improved run times. The project is almost certainly the reason for the release of WebKit’s SunSpider JavaScript benchmarking tool late last year. So far, SquirrelFish promises speeds 1.6 times that of its predecessor.

Tuesday Apple provided a developer build of Safari 4 that will be in line with 10.6 Snow Leopards mission of improving speed and stability across the OS. In addition, the team has announced plans to allow for web applications to saved and executed offline, similar to Google’s Gears project and the third part application Fluid. In terms of expected features, the browser will likely improve upon its handling of CSS and DOM Level 3 standards, and possibly begin to incorporate features outlined in the draft for the new HTML spec.

Today was yet another great day. The WWDC Bash at Yerba Buena Gardens was lots of fun! With the fourth day now over, here is a summary of Thursday at WWDC 2008, some in pictures, some in videos and some in text. Tomorrow is your last chance- if you would like to meet up with us, please contact us!!

Articles:
Live from the 2008 WWDC Bash at Yerba Buena Gardens (theiLife)

More Pictures:
Sidney’s WWDC Flickr Set

Gallery after the jump! Read more…

For the second year in a row, Apple will be hosting the 2008 WWDC Bash at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco. Beginning at 6:30 PST, the event will have live music and food to celebrate a hard week of work and draw closure to WWDC 2008. The party is currently scheduled to end at 9:30 PST and it is unknown who the live music will be provided by. As always, stick with theiLife.com for the latest coverage, as Sidney San Martin will be in attendance of the WWDC Bash tonight. Photos and text updates to follow!

From Apple:
Below are important details for tonight’s WWDC Bash at Yerba Buena Gardens.

Wristbands—If you intend on enjoying beer or wine this evening, you will need to pick up your wristband at any Registration Counter on Level 1 before going to the Bash. Please bring a government issued photo ID and your conference badge.

Entrance to the Bash at Yerba Buena Gardens—Please enter Yerba Buena Gardens on Mission Street, between Third and Fourth Streets (Fourth Street runs between Moscone West and the Sony Metreon). You must be wearing your conference badge to be admitted to the Bash.

1:59PM PST: Just after Lunch here at WWDC, more sessions are beginning and I have obtained not obtained my wristband to get into tonight’s party (that’s only for 21+ attendees)! More content coming soon.

7:38PM PST: Arriving at WWDC bash, new photos posted! Check the liveblog at live.theilife.com!!

Gallery after the jump! Read more…

Stump the Experts is one of the highlights of a WWDC experience. Stump the Experts is the most popular session at WWDC- by far. TheiLife.com is bringing coverage from this years event in the form of transcribed text and photos. In the meantime, for those who aren’t familiar with how the game is played (via Wikipedia):

Stump the Experts is structured as a game show in which the audience acts as one team, and the experts on stage are another. The audience may ask the experts any question related to Apple in an attempt to “stump” them, hoping to earn a point for their team. Conversely, experts may ask the audience questions that any audience member may try to answer. Any and all resources are allowed including source code, the Internet (e.g., Wikipedia & Google) and cell phones. Host Fred Huxham describes it as an “open book test”.
Stump the Experts is chaotically hosted by Fred Huxham and Mark “The Red” Harlan.

There are three types of questions (via Wikipedia):

Songs – The 7-8 songs played before Stump the Experts begins are chosen by Fred, the leader of the show for the past 15 years. Audience members may come up to the microphones and guess the artist and name of the songs to win prizes and get points for their team.
Images – The experts create cryptic images that represent Apple-related phrases or information. The audience must decipher the image’s meaning. This innovation was introduced by Craig Marciniak in 2006.
Standard – Questions about arcane Apple knowledge.

Sidney San Martin from theiLife.com is attending the 2008 Stump the Experts and will be transcribing some of the questions as well as bringing back photos. Check back soon.