Sero sed Serio

Buy Spore. Seriously, buy Spore, or I’ll come round and injure you. Okay, so I’m probably kidding, but on the offchance that I’m not, grab it anyway. It’s more accurate than creationism, more zen than Monkey Ball, and more fun than trying to watch Zita Swoon videos on Youtube whilst on a train. What, you can tell I’m on a train? Is it that obvious that I wouldn’t be blogging unless I couldn’t get into Second Life? You know me too well.

Anyway, if you don’t know Spore, then oldskool gamers may consider it an evolution simulator - from primordial soup to advanced civilization - but when I say simulator, I’m not implying endless screens of figures, more like stomping around being a darwinian nightmare.

Spore Origins (to give its iPhone incarnation its full name) is the first steps of evolution - you won’t be building cities or making horrifying penile rhinoceros monsters, but what you do get is a taste of life in the primordial soup.

And lo and behold, my train ain’t far from home, so it’s time to pop a cap in this demireview ’til I get more time…

Just…… get Spore. Okay?

So you’ve got an iPhoto library full of proper-sized images form your proper camera, but in amongst them are low-rez ones from your iPhone. Doesn’t mean they’re good, but they’re bound to occur all over the place, causing iPhoto 08 to spawn numerous events with only one or two photos in. Tedious. Better to have them all in one place, no?

then here’s a quick little one-shot solution for you. Make a Smart Album for them. Like this:

With the camera model set to iPhone, you’ll be able to see all your iPhone shots in one long reel.

Yup, it’s been a while since I had a phone I actually like, during which I’ve just about survived with 3’s SkypePhone v1, which is equal parts tolerable and absolute nightmare. But more on that another time.

Instead, I’m currently toting my cousin’s first-gen iPhone, which is in great condition, and barring a bit of teething (because of course the infamous infinite startup bug hit me while I was a few hundred miles from my home mac ‘pon which it was backed up) it’s pretty damn kickin’.

So, being an übergeek, I thought I’d wax technical now and again, and share some tips. Nothing has quite the nerdtastic satisfaction of blogging something that hordes of iPhone forum users haven’t worked out yet!

Also, since my loverly iPhone is my first bit of decent tech which can take photos and sustain a perpetual data connection, I fully intend to spend one day a month (if possible) photoblogging. And I’m not talking about 20 shots of ambient skyline and shots of what I ate that day, I’m thinking more like one photo every 5 minutes for 24 hours. Think it’ll be a horrible endurance marathon? Think it’ll be too much of a peek into my life? Think it’ll be hideously tedious? Think it’s an excuse to get USB gizmos to keep the battery juiced? Sure, it’ll be all of those things. But since I’m an artface, and since life can be pretty interesting sometimes, it might be a groovy little experiment. Keep an eye on mah Twitter, y’all!

Now that firmware 2.0 is out, and everyone’s blogging their faces off about the new features of and/or failure to acquire their new 3G iPhones, I noticed a little nugget that’ll please iPod Touch owners that nobody else seems to have noticed yet:

Everyone with Maps on their pod will have noticed that it can sometimes find your position when you’re connected to a wi-fi network, but most of the time, there’s no point in leaving wi-fi on when you’re on the move, so this has gone relatively unnoticed:

The “locate me” button in Maps  can now be toggled… and if you leave it lit  blue, and you’re walking or driving through a reasonably urban or residential area with wi-fi on, Maps will pick up your location using networks you don’t have a password for. In the car this week, in a journey of just 4 streets, the iPod picked up about 8 networks on the way home, tracking us fairly accurately, if only every hundred feet or so.

It’s not quite GPS, and you wouldn’t want to drive using it, but if you’ve got enough map tiles loaded for your town/city, you can pretty much entirely fail to get lost ever again.

Well, until they see fit to give me copy&paste, Email, Notes, and a manually cacheable version of Maps, Apple are just going to have to put up with me jailbreaking my 1.1.2 iPod Touch quite a bit.
It’s all looking quite inevitable that the touch will gain many of the iPhone’s apps - otherwide, once the SDK is out, the iTouch will be running 3rd party apps for all those functions, and it’ll look a bit eggy on the face of Apple.

Anyway, if you’re in a similar boat, maybe you’d like my replacement icons for the MobileMusicPlayer app (that’s Music or Ipod to most of you…) You should be able to SSH it into mobilemusicplayer.app…. but back up your old icon.

There’s or to dig…

I don’t have iPhone jealousy, gawddammit, until a few versions on, and if I can entrust my iPod, phone and web slab to one nonswitchable battery, though.