Iron Ink Media: Inked Up

This site is great. It’s called FreeAppAlert.com and it lets you know about newly free apps. It’s easy to go check out all the free apps in your app store on the iPhone, but this site lets you know which formerly paid apps have just become free to the masses.

Definitely check it out. We think we’ll add it to our blogroll.

According to ZDNet:

In a letter to the FCC, AT&T acknowledged that Apple and AT&T have an agreement to block VoIP apps from using AT&T’s cellular networks, but that VoIP apps that use Wi-Fi are OK. Here’s a selection from the letter.

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…AT&T and Apple agreed that Apple would not take affirmative steps to enable an iPhone to use AT&T’s wireless service (including 2G, 3G and Wi-Fi) to make VoIP calls without first obtaining AT&T’s consent. AT&T and Apple also agreed, however, that if a third party enables an iPhone to make VoIP calls using AT&T’s wireless service, Apple would have
no obligation to take action against that third party.

The parties’ concurrence on this provision was particularly important in light of the risks the parties assumed in bringing the iPhone to market.

If this is an agreement with AT&T, could things change with a Verizon partnership? Still, having a VoIP phone in your home wouldn’t be neccesary if an app, like Skype, could be used on a home Wi-Fi network.

Photographer Louis Psihoyos is slamming Apple with a $2 million iPhone lawsuit, claiming that Apple used his image of “1000 TV’s” in promotional materials for i.TV without his consent.

“Version 1.0 of i.TV directly infringed on Mr. Psihoyos’ copyright by incorporating the 1000 TVs image without permission,” attorneys for the photographer claim in court papers filed this week in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The lawyers say that “by commercially exploiting the plaintiff’s copyrighted image in the i.TV application” without the photographer’s consent, Apple has benefited while hurting Psihoyos.

“1000 TV’s” is an image of a person surrounded by….a bunch of TV’s. Apple apparently liked it but didn’t officially put a ring on it.

Citing a ChangeWave Research study, some dude at CNN says that the iPhone 3GS has a better return rate than the Palm Pre. The Pre gets returned about 11% of the time, whereas the new iPhone gets returned 7% of the time. Once again, the iPhone wins.

I admittedly have no sense of direction. None. I once drove two and a half hours in the wrong direction before I realized it – and my family will never let me live it down. That’s why when I recently moved I received a GPS device as a house warming gift. But now personal navigation device companies are delving into the iPhone app world.

The WSJ wrote about TomTom’s app and believes it’s the one expensive iPhone app that people might actually buy.

The app’s user interface will be familiar to users of TomTom’s navigation devices, from its menu screens to the way the map looks. It also uses IQ Routes, a TomTom proprietary technology that helps people get to their locations based on trillions of data bits that users have contributed. It has 6 million points of interest on North American maps, and turn-by-turn functions that are available in two-dimensional or three-dimensional views.

IPhone users can get directions to addresses in their contacts list, and use some of the gestures — such as pinching to zoom and rotating the phone to go from portrait to landscape mode — that are native to the smart phone.

The app costs $100 is the US, $140 in Western Europe, $95 in New Zealand, and $80 in Australia. Those prices do not include the mount that will attach to your dash and charge the phone. Definitely a cheaper alternative to current GPS devices, but you obviously can’t use your phone as, well, a phone and see directions at the same time.

MocoNews.net reports that halfway through the year Apple sales are strong, and could continue at this pace by just maintaining their current market share.

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) had a 13.7 percent global market share in the smart phone sector and sold 5.2 million devices during that three-month period.

At that pace, Apple is on track to sell more than 50 million iPhones a year by the September 2011, according to Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi. Barrons reports in order to achieve that goal, all Apple would have to do is maintain its market share and broaden distribution. Sacconaghi writes in a note that if the smartphone market grows at 27 percent, then Apple will sell 10.3 million more phones based on its current share.

And what about the rumored (but very likely) partnership with Verizon? Well that…

could garner 11 million units and additional deals in Europe and Asia could add another 10 million. Add that to the 20 million it sold in fiscal 2009, and presto, you’ve got 50 million.

Facebook has submitted the latest version of their iPhone app to Apple for approval. Here are some notes on the upcoming features:

1. The “new” News Feed
2. Like
3. Events (including the ability to RSVP)
4. Notes
5. Pages
6. Create new photo albums
7. Upload photos to any album
8. Zoom into photos
9. Easier photo tagging
10. Profile Pictures albums
11. A new home screen for easy access to all your stuff, search, and notifications
12. Add your favorite profiles and pages to the home screen
13. Better Notifications (they link to the comments so you can reply)
14. Quickly call or text people right from the Friends page
15. Messages you are typing will be restored if you quit or are interrupted by a phone call

Let’s just hope this one actually works. Forget all the stupid bells and whistles. How about this version actually shows you all the posts in your news feed as opposed to just 60% of them.

If you are an Ebay junkie who also loves your iPhone, then you are in luck. Ebay just upgraded their iPhone app so that you can now get push messages sent to your phone when someone outbids you on something great like a 1988 Flavor Flav t-shirt.

Another new feature is that Integrated Pay with Paypal support, which allows users to pay for some items (like, say, a Larry Walker Montreal Expos jersey) within the app. This means they don’t have to go pay on a traditional computer or use the iPhone’s Safari browser.

USAA, a small bank that services mostly military personnel, is now updating it’s iPhone application to allow remote check depositing. By using the iPhone’s camera, people can take a picture of both sides of the check and use that to deposit the check.

“We’re essentially taking an image of the check, and once you hit the send button, that image is going into our deposit-taking system as any other check would,” USAA Executive Vice President Wayne Peacock said.

Does this kind of thing excite you or scare you? The world is changing, my friends.

Who cares if every elementary school in the country has one in the classroom. The iPhone is no place for learning! You can tune into prime time television every night and hear swear words, but Apple is stepping in and saving the country from corruption. In all seriousness, this is just absurd.

TechCrunch writer John Biggs rants about the censoring AND 17+ rating NinjaWords got slapped with.

In order to prevent accidental disclosure of bad words, the programming team was nice enough to require users to type in entire bad words in order to see them (”fuck” not “fuc”) – ensuring you can’t just flick through and find them – but that’s not nearly enough for Apple. No, the dictionary must be scoured of scurrilous talk.

After being rejected a first time, the programmers removed most of the bad words, missed one, and got rejected again… Finally, after a long wait they got into the app store but on double-secret probation with a 17+ rating and warnings of potential objectionable content.