You can do this for any app without any extra software. It’s pretty easy.

1. Right click on the dock icon and select Show in Finder
2. Right click on the app and select Show Package Contents
3. In the Contents folder, open Info.plist in a text editor
4. Look for this line “LSUIElement” and change the following string value from 0 to 1.
5. Restart the app and it should appear without a Dock icon.

Note that you have to do this each time after updating the app.

Taken from: GetSatisfaction

The application is $6.99 but honestly, if you have a SIP account ( Gizmo5 provides you with this ) this should open so many doors for you the price should be negligible.

Get it before AT&T complains!

iTunes Store Link
Company Website

I mean GizmoProject has applications for every other device out there, yet they have not talked about doing a iPhone application. There is incredible demand for such an application specially if it is paired with some sort of multi-ring solution such as the now hidden (dead?) Grand Central. I do not understand why this application is not available. Fring is out, and it has SIP calling, but it inexplicably doesnt have a keypad on the call screen so any of the applications that ask you to press any key are unusable. Calling your bank? Sorry!

If you could get a Grand Central number (sigh… Grand Central) you could connect to Gizmo5 and have your Grand Central number ring your Gizmo5 number on your iPhone. Imagine that. You don’t give out your mobile phone number and people would be able to call you anywhere you are as long as you are in WiFi range.

Perhaps the main failure here is actually Apple’s. There is no way to have the phone have a background process that would be able to recieve the call unless you run the application and then lock your phone.

Until then, I think there’s a huge oportunity for whoever comes out to market first. Figure the background process later.

Here are five things I believe Google needs to do if it is going to survive

1. Get Mozilla intrested in the platform
   Have Songbird, Thunderbird and Firefox have plugins that make syncing with Android a breeze. It is the only way to take on the iTunes stronghold.
2. Hulu, Amazon and e-Music should all jump on the opportunity
   Build services that you can use straight from the device just like the Mobile iTunes store. If not, Open Source developers should build such an application, a media service that does everything. Hmm maybe the Netflix integration and movie/preview intergration that some iPhone apps have now.
3. GRAND CENTRAL
   I have no idea what Google is doing with Grand Central but they are really missing the biggest of opportunities. VoIP on a phone right out of the box would force competition and really start a new wave of devices and ideas flowing through this saturated, bloated market.
4. Google Push service
   Just like the Palm Pre joins all the information you need in one simple page from around the web. Google needs to jump on this same idea and do it better. Setup push services for all its services and make it only available to Android devices. Push Calendar, Push Email, Push Contacts, for free. Add online storage/streaming in a Amazon S3 fashion where you pay as you go, or are able to pay up front for a set cap.
5. Software and Hardware are not mutually exclusive
   The Google Android team should have some visibility into the devices and they should have a design standard. I am not saying to police the OS, that would be impossible. Make a ‘Google Certified’ badge and every phone that has the Google logo on it should have gone rigurous testing so that it is a polished product. The G1 could have been great but the hardware and the software didn’t seem to agree with each other at many points. If HTC wants to launch that, they can, they just don’t get to print Google in the back. The Palm Pre, the Apple iPhone and the Blackberry Storm are all systems where one team was in charge of both sides of the device, and it shows. Google needs this, NOW.

   -=BONUS=-

6. Make the OS available: All Networks, Set-Top Boxes, Phones, Netbooks, Refrigerators, Toasters
   The more Google pushes the OS outside the ‘Open Handset Alliance’ the more closer the connected home will become. The closer that becomes the more information Google and its partners can organize, sort and monetize. Forget the whole network lock, don’t promise exclusivity to any of the carriers. Sell unlocked phones even if they cost more. The availability of the OS is the most important thing. If my refrigerator knows I’m missing milk and it texts my phone when it knows im close to a supermarket. If my phone can manage my set-top box to record a movie tonight, and edit my Netflix Watch Now queue. If all this works with other OSes like OS X and Windows. Wouldn’t that be a killer app?

What I am proposing is not a platform to replace any other platform. I am proposing a platform that interfaces between them all and becomes the way devices communicate with one another. Hell, thats what Sony promised my PS3 was going to do years ago… Google has a shot at making it so.

I really don’t know why it took so long for the game to be released on the iPhone when The Iconfactory was one of the first companies on-board the iPhone with a version of Twitteriffic (a free version, and a ridiculously priced $10 version… kind of makes me wonder what their CPMs on The Deck are), but Gedeon posted on his blog that he was happy that it was not a launch application.

Frenzic is $5 on the App Store right now. It is fun, addictive and best of all, portable.

Tapulous‘ Twinkle, this is no longer the case as it was available in the app store for FREE quickly after the stores launch.

What makes it so great? Well it’s Twitter + location. All the microblogging goodness of Twitter with all the benefits of a device that knows where you are at any given moment. It is quite simple really. They have a timeline that is only available through Twinkle, when you post something they add it to their location based timeline and to your Twitter timeline. If you post anything while you are not on Twinkle, it copies it into your Twinkle timeline from Twitter.

This has allowed me to have conversations and get informed I things that are happening around me. That I would have never have found out about otherwise. Really making the whole Twitter experience a whole lot more enjoyable.

This is not to say that Twinkle doesn’t have it’s faults, because it seriously does.

1. While Twinkle synchronizes with Twitter, it is not Twitter
   Twinkle uses it’s own timeline and it’s own usernames. When you first log into Twinkle it creates a Twinkle account and you then have the option to tie in a Twitter account. Having a Twitter account is actually optional.
2. Not requiring a Twitter account is confusing
   My girlfriend kept sending me messages for a week or so through Twinkle that I kept getting late in the day when I’m on my way home and check Twinkle. While at work I use Twitterrific and she had forgotten to tie up her Twinkle and Twitter accounts. She thought she was posting to Twitter, she wasn’t.
3. Separate Twinkle and Twitter accounts break Twitter more than they help it
   Twitter’s @reply system is already quite broken. There is no need to break it more with names that are not valid and names that are not correct. There is a guy who posts around the Denver area that has the Twinkle name ‘The Internet’ if I @reply to him it would tweet ‘@The Internet’. Anybody will tell you that won’t work because Twitter names don’t have spaces. Twitter will think that I replied to @the. Also there is a Twitter user called @theinternet and they are not related. It’s stuff like that that doesn’t help the platform, because it segregates and creates wrong data that then gets added to my feeds.
4. People think Twinkle is Instant Messaging
   Too many times have I logged on to Twinkle and it is completely useless because one user decided he/she was going to reply to everysingle message in the last hour and effectively spammed my feed. In the Denver area there’s like four serious offenders. This gets worse because there is no way around it. I would make it so that after 2-3 messages back and forth it would get parsed out and I would see a ‘conversation between x and y’ post in my timeline instead of the whole thing. Also, Twinkle does not let you filter/block people, which is really frustrating.
5. Expand the application further
   Make it so that I can create a beacon and have people within 100 feet from me know that I am near them this would make for random encounters between the Twitteratti easier.

I really am now thinking of a more robust Twinkle that can do what they are doing now, better. A tool that allows for Twittering and chatting based on locations. Twitter + location + irc. But that’s another blog post all together.

Twinkle version 1.2 has been promised to be out soon with at least being able to block users, but that is not necessarily a good thing because honestly, I don’t mind the chatterboxes, Id just rather have the option to read all their messages or not.

In conclusion, go get Twinkle now if you own an iPhone. But please pick the same name as your Twitter account!

HTC and Research In Motion have been hard at work creating devices that will compete head to head with it. RIM even deciding that ‘html email’ is something that should come standard, and HTC jumping on the open handset run before anyone else and being the first one with an actual product to show for it, the T-Mobile G1. Too bad Blackberries are still mainly business devices and the G1 is not as open as it should be. They actually had a chance otherwise.

For all I talk about the iPhone I want to really point out that the second a better device comes out, I will most likely upgrade to it. Maybe next year, maybe in two years. I am not biased towards the iPhone, Apple is just doing it better than anybody else. I want a device that frees me from my laptop and allows me to do whatever it is that I want to do on the road.

If I have to log onto my work server and run a job to check the output when I get home I can SSH in no problem. If I have to check the status of my fantasy team (no matter what fantasy sports service I am using), or if I want to buy tickets to the baseball game on my way there. I can do that all from my iPhone. I can stream music from Pandora or Last.fm. I can twitter with people around me with Twinkle. I can leave notes for myself that sync with all my computers and the internet through Evernote. I don’t need to worry about not having 3G because it defaults to EDGE, and it has Wi-Fi for faster transfers and network recognition through Air Sharing. The connectivity possibilities are endless because it uses bluetooth, a 3.5mm headphone jack and the incredibly common iPod universal connector jack.

The touch screen is nice, but as I’ve said before. Its all about connectivity and the applications. I really can’t say I feel too confident right now about where the T-Mobile G1 is going. The application store for the G1 is still not ready and whenever it is ready it will not be as robust as the iTunes App Store is now. Plus it seems like Google has dropped the ball when it comes to advertising the thing. What they’ve shown in the tech demos is amazing. Why are people not talking about this phone?

Why is the device ‘expandable to 8GB’ ?. If there is something Apple learned early, the more storage you put in the device, the more people will want. I think I’m the only one of my friends who has a 8GB iPhone 3G, and thats just because I know I’ll be right out that line next year for the third gen iPhone if nothing changes. With a pricetag of $180 for the phone with 1GB, if I wanted to get a 8GB microSD card for it to be comparable to the bottom end iPhone I’d have to spend $23.03 more, just charge me $199 and include the 8GB card? jeez.

Why does it not use a normal 3.5mm headphone jack? So if I break my headphones, I have to go to a T-Mobile store to find their special headphones or I need to get a little adapter that I have to carry around. Why?! There is no need for this.

I am however, excited that Android finally has a hardware incarnation. Apple desperately needs some competition, maybe they’ll stop banning apps because of their “don’t compete against Apple” clause in their T&Cs. The full keyboard on the device is also very interesting and I love that it features a 3.1mp camera, the iPhone’s camera sucks.

I am watching this develop quite rapidly and I am really interested, but somehow, underwhelmed. Somebody at Google has dropped a ball and T-Mobile seems to be tripping on it. God I hope I’m wrong…

Here’s Wired’s comparison of the two devices.

1. Go to the Applications tab in your iPhone / iPod Touch
2. Deselect the problematic application
3. Sync the device (this will remove the device and all its data)
4. Re-Select the application in iTunes
5. Sync the device (this will install the application again)

The main problem with that approach is that it deletes all the information about the application from the iPhone. This is unacceptable.

This is what Pangea Software has to say about it:

UPDATE ERASED YOUR SAVED GAMES?

There appears to be a bug in Apple’s App Store updater where installing an update to an app will randomly delete the existing App’s data files. In the case of Enigmo, this will cause your saved games to get deleted. This problem appears to be rare, but it does affect many people. So, you should be backing up your iPhone with iTunes, and if this happens you can restore it so you won’t lose your saved games.

If there is one thing that upsets me more than losing my saved games, is having to restore the whole device in order to retrieve saved games.

This happens with all applications, if you had the LinkedIn application you will have to give it your information again, if you had Aurora Feint, you have to watch that dumb movie that is most likely the reason why its 25 MB to begin with and then start over from training level. I have an Aurora Feint account but for some reason last time I updated and had to delete the application, when I logged back into the account, my level was reset.

Apple needs to step up to the plate and fix this ‘unknown error’. In fact, they don’t even have to fix it, they just have to ask us if we want to delete the application and its data, or just the application, not just delete everything. That would be enough.

If my PSP or DS erased game saves randomly they would not be considered real gaming machines, they’d be considered toys. If Apple is serious about entering the mobile gaming device market, they need to make sure that their hardware/software performs up to PSP/DS standards. Now to re-level Aurora Feint.

What I will talk about is the lack of a Shopping Cart and the ridiculous pricing scheme concocted by the people at Apple. I understand why Apple decided against the shopping cart it is not a streamlined process and actually gives people an opportunity to think about the purchase before doing it. That is a big problem if you are trying to sell as many things as possible as -fast- as possible. I deal with user interaction on a everyday basis, I know this. This is about as far as they thought it through however, take a look at this:

These are all the applications by My Accounts To Go, a page you can see for yourself by clicking here. Appart from the completely hideous un-imaginative icon, you can notice that while one application is free the other two applications are $449.99. Yes, you read that right, these applications are four hundred fourty nine dollars and ninetynine cents… each. In the description of all 3 of the applications they specify the following “Customer information from Microsoft Dynamics GP or SAP BusinessOne accounting systems are now directly accessible fro your Apple iPhone”. Even though there is clearly one for Dynamics GP and another for SAP BusinessOne, there is only one demo for the two which means they are fairly similar looks wise, but their inner workings are entirely different.

Before you start hating on the price point please understand. These are enterprise applications. These are serious, mission critical, applications and My Accounts To Go will most likely give them support as such. When you buy enterprise applications you are paying for the support and the knowledge that the system is not going to randomly go down. For instance, if tomorrow I check this blog and its not there, I’m going to call my provider, Host Gator and ask them whats up and hopefully they can explain and give me a refund or some credit or something. If I get to work on monday and our server is down, Rackspace actually has some liability in that case. It is an enterprise class application. Same difference, and judging from some reviews the applications warrant the $449.99 price point, so that is not an issue.

The issue is that they are in the App Store to begin with and this is something that Apple needs to address soon. My Accounts To Go is too busy making enterprise applications to give their three applications different icons. So there is actually no way for you to identify them without reading the name. The name is ‘MyAccountsToGo – *’, meaning you have to get through the name of the company to get to what you really want to read which is what version it is that you are getting. Which is not a problem unless you are trying to buy it on the iPhone itself (imagine that…) where it looks like this:

Yes, the price is there, but I never want to be less than two taps away from buying a $449.99 application, and If I did want to buy such an application, I would not like It to be so easy to confuse it with the version I do not want.

I really do not understand if the My Accounts To Go team is unaware that this is how their applications are showing up in the store… or if they are expecting you to make that mistake. Do they not know that their name shows up on top of the application? That if you search, their company name is also a field that the search looks in so therefore the applications can be called different things? Why is this allowed in the App Store?

When Apple set out to create an App Store they wanted to create something where you can buy applications on a whim, but they also wanted to allow serious applications to be available and I applaud them for that because the iPhone is now, not a phone, it is a mobile platform and that is just a remarkable achievement, but this is ridiculous. Can’t they set a cap on the price of items that they show me? I dont want any application that is more than $20 dollars to show up on my iPhone if I am unable to turn off this 1-tap purchase thing. If not give me a switch, and make enterprise applications harder to get to, so I don’t randomly stumble across them during my every-day browsing. You know what? Just give me a SHOPPING CART.

The one application I bought on iTunes (for those of you interested, it was Things, which I talked about in an earlier post) was $9.99  plus about $0.30 cents of tax. What will this end up being with taxes? Why can’t I review my purchase in a screen that details what I’m buying, for how much and what tax will be involved in the transaction? This is an oversight by Apple and they should seriously fix it.

All is fun and games at the App Store until somebody accidentally taps on the purchase button, which is conveniently the price button on the iPhone after one tap, and ends up with a $500 dollar app he/she has no use for whatsoever.

Also… My Accounts To Go, at $450 a pop, you can afford distinct icons for each one of those applications, get on it.

I got to play with her iPhone for a little bit to show her how to do things without really using that much effort, for instance, having the phone application be in contacts before closing it, that way she can press the home button twice and have it go there automatically (granted she is not playing music at the moment). Then she said she missed her Blackberry and she did not understand the iPhone hype.

That’s when it dawned on me. The iPhone itself is an extremely boring device. It has a nice style to it and it is certainly well made, but honestly applications make the iPhone. The fact that you don’t have an instant messaging application, multimedia sms, direct access to the address book and that you still have to sync through iTunes… Its just painful for those who don’t care about music and videos and just want a serious business device.

Now, Apple has been working hard to solve this. They have included exchange support to the platform and will finally bring address book search to the production model (they’ve shown it off in presentations before, but never actually made it out). This will certainly appease a few people, but not all. Apple never set out to create a smart phone, they never set out to create a platform. This is best seen when you see how they divided their company, Mac (OS X based devices), iPhone (Moile OS X based devices), Music (FairPlay based services).

What does this all mean? It means that Apple has been guiding everybody along. They changed the rules of the game last year when they introduced the iPhone. They then helped people update their websites to fit within wireless standards and just declared the iPhone resolution as the resolution to be. This helped many web developers get their websites up to date and running on mobile devices, which is something that Android users will benefit from later this year. That is all well and good, but everybody knew at one point the iPhone would have to be open to developers, even while Steve claimed they couldn’t open it because it would be a risk to AT&T’s network. Like clockwork, once they were convinced that websites would still create mobile optimized websites, they moved to the SDK.

That day is now, when the application store opens it will be a completely different game. The iPhone will really shine and people will be able to see that the iPhone is all about the applications. You might just shrug and say that Blackberry has had applications for years, and you would be correct. This is not a new concept, creating applications for phones, the shift is in who has these phones and what the software will be focusing on.

Let me put this into perspective, if you go to the Blackberry Application store right now these are the ten best selling applications for the Blackbery Pearl:

1. Ringtone Megaplex for Blackberry ($19.95)
2. eOffice – Document Production & Attachment Editing: MS Word and Excel ($69.95)
3. BBSmart Email Viewer ($29.95)
4. IM+ All-in-One Messenger for Blackberry ($49.95)
5. RepliGo Professional (1 Year) ($79.95)
6. e-Mobile Today ($19.95)
7. IM+ for Skype ($29.95)
8. WorldMate Live Gold Membership ($99.95)
9. PDF and Office Graphical Attachment Booster for Blackberry – DocHawk Platinum – One Year ($)
10. SplashID for Blackberry ($)

Are you bored yet? Oh, yeah, there’s also games. and they all look like they were created years ago for the Palm and were ported by a monkey that didn’t quite understand what he was doing. Those are $9.95~ on average. I think you understand how, apart from games, nobody will pay those prices for software outside of the corporate world. Specially if the software is just a one year subscription. There’s even some software that I don’t understand there. BBSmart Email Viewer allows your emails to be more readable? You mean Blackberry knows they have a problem where the emails are kind of hard to read, but they refuse to fix it?

Early reports about the Apple App Store place most software between free and 9.99. Which means more people will be willing to just buy an app because they like the idea, than because they need it.

Considering the iPhone can already read PDFs, Excel and Word documents you will only be needing a chat application from that list, and perhaps the e-Mobile which gives you a dashboard view of everything that is happening.

This is the true power of the iPhone, connecting normal people to their everyday lives. The eBay application is the first one I will download. Bloggers will now have TypePad on their phones to blog away at their hearts desire. TomTom already mentioned they were going to bring turn by turn navigation. This is all opt-in. You do not have to buy an application you do not want.

You do not have to pay AT&T for their television service, but I am sure an application will come along that will let you access it.

All in all, I believe that when the Application store opens you will see why all the tech geeks hyped the iPhone so much and why we are disappointed that in Apple’s second incarnation of it, they decided to just refine their original, rather than push the envelope again.