Hasta La Gadget!

It sure didn’t take long for the dev community to hack into Apple TV’s iOS build. One of the first payouts is a port of Apple TV’s “lowtide” 10-foot user interface to an iPod touch as briefly demonstrated in the first video after the break. While not very useful on such a small display, that could change when ported to the iPad’s bigger 10-inch display. In fact, that might be Apple’s plan according to our friend Erica Sadun who’s been busily spelunking the Apple TV’s disk image. She posits that the iPad could launch the lowtide UI when responding to AirPlay requests in a future iOS build.

Another minor victory was achieved by TUAW reader Arix who spliced the Apple TV’s AirPlay daemon onto a jailbroken iPhone 3GS thus allowing it to receive AirPlay streams (second video). But the best news of all, perhaps, is the ability to restore the Apple TV in iTunes by connecting its micro-USB port to your computer. That means that existing PC- and Mac-based jailbreak tools can be updated to work over the connection. In fact, TinyUmbrella has already been updated to backup the Apple TV’s SHSH blobs in order to preserve your ability to downgrade in the future. With 8GB of storage and 256MB of RAM to play with, we suspect this little media puck will become quite the developer playground, with or without Apple’s consent.

Continue reading Apple TV restores in iTunes via micro-USB, UI hacked onto iPod touch (video)

Apple TV restores in iTunes via micro-USB, UI hacked onto iPod touch (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 07:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apps are funny things. They tend to provide narrow utility — focusing intensely on one specific thing — but once you get used to them, you wonder how you lived without them. Take this Awareness! app, for example: it gauges environmental noise levels, sets up a threshold, and then pipes in anything louder than that into your skull alongside your music. Reasons why you’d want that to happen include oncoming SUVs, mothers screaming because their babies are in peril (from oncoming SUVs), or something as benign as your teacher yelling at you for not paying attention in class. There’s a nice set of options too, such as manually adjusting how loud a sound must be to be allowed entry into your cranium, as well as pausing of the app or of your music. Awareness! is available for five bucks on the iPhone and iPod touch, and will soon jump on to the iPad, Android, Symbian, and even the Mac and PC.

Continue reading iPhone Awareness! app selectively filters outside noises into your headphones, saves hipster lives

iPhone Awareness! app selectively filters outside noises into your headphones, saves hipster lives originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Sep 2010 04:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading Google Earth 3.1 for iOS gets its ocean layer, Eric Schmidt’s undersea base conspicuously absent

Google Earth 3.1 for iOS gets its ocean layer, Eric Schmidt’s undersea base conspicuously absent originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Sep 2010 10:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you weren’t already convinced that Apple is seriously easing back on some of its more annoying App Store restrictions with the appearance of titles like GV Voice (a Google Voice client), this news might help. After a wild ride of ping-pong approvals and pulls, Manomio’s C64 emulator has reappeared in the Store with its BASIC interpreter fully intact, and available for your coding pleasure. We’ve tested the software and can confirm that you will indeed be able to revisit your youth (provided your youth took place in the early 80’s) via the newest version of the software. Of course, it’s not super fun to program using the tiny, virtual C64 keyboard provided onscreen, but couple this with a Bluetooth keyboard of your choosing, and you can pretty much go wild. The emulator is available right this moment for $4.99, and obviously it’s a free upgrade for those who’ve already bought in.

As Apple relaxes App Store rules, C64 emulator for iOS gets BASIC again originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 18 Sep 2010 12:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As with almost any software update, Apple has seemingly introduced a few new issues while ironing out a couple of others. Automotive forums around the web are ablaze with talk that iOS 4.1 has introduced any number of playback problems, with the bulk of complainers citing scratching, crackling or random disconnects when piping audio from their device to their vehicle via the dock connector. We’ve tested two iOS 4.1-equipped iPhone 4 handsets in two separate vehicles here at Engadget HQ, and we saw no quirks whatsoever, but we’ve no doubt that the issue is real to some extent. Prior firmwares have caused permanent incompatibilities between our iPods and vehicles before, and we’re about at our wit’s end. We know it’s impossible for the software engineers at Cupertino to test new builds on every car adapter out there, but we’re starting to wonder if they bother to plug ’em into any vehicles at all. Tell us below if you’ve pulled any hairs out in recent days, won’t you?

[Image courtesy of Murphy5156 / TiPb]

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Did iOS 4.1 introduce in-car USB playback problems for you? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Sep 2010 10:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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