You may have noticed most iPhone apps (actual apps, not transvestite websites with hairy HTML poking out behind ill-fitting iPhone lingerie) are poo. Specifically, most iPhone apps are dog poo that’s been eaten by a particularly nasty dog, then been pooed again prior to being set on fire. Here’s twelve that aren’t.

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Another great format war ended this week, with Blu-Ray to 70% of released films and, according to the Financial Times, HD-DVD left with one major studio. HD-DVD owners are either mildly put out, or happy they can now pick up HD movies for a few dollars as they’re tossed out by major retailers.

We’ve been here before: whether RealPlayer versus Windows Media, BSD versus Linux, or boxers versus briefs. Let’s take a look back at some of the great format wars of our time.

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iPhone 1.1.2 is the current iPhone firmware.  If you’re running something older, you’re missing out on: a bunch of bug fixes and improvements to Safari, seeing your battery charge in iTunes, ringtones,  and if for those outside the US, vastly improved international support.  1.1.3 isn’t out, much less cracked. If you’re still running old firmware, now’s the perfect time to upgrade to 1.1.2, because the new iNdependence makes it damn easy.

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The following guide allows you to wirelessly sync an iPhone with Amarok in Ubuntu 7.10, including:

• adding, editing and playing songs to the iPhone
• creating and copying playlists to the iPhone
• copy songs from iPhone to the Amarok library

It takes less than 10 minutes, and is completely graphical. Read the rest of this entry »

The question above is the only question on Google Labs Aptitude Test that relates to an Operating System. It’s a good question: it immediately gets rid of fanboys who can’t see anything wrong with any tool they love, and allows people who are passionate and knowledgeable enough about Unix to demonstrate the can either:

• see Unix’s faults
• tell Google they prefer Unix in uppercase, just like MULTICS was.

This is part one of a multipart series, published over the next two weeks. This week: text processing.

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Need to access your Mac files from Linux? Downloaded something on one OS and need to put it on the other? Sharing files between OS X and Ubuntu is easy. The following guide takes 10 seconds and doesn’t involve any terminal usage or extra software.

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Oktoprep, a program to unlock the latest iPhone 1.1.2 firmware update, was released today.

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Bash, the default shell in Linux and OS X, loses history data after running multiple shells at the same time - for example, using multiple tabs in the terminal. The fix is simple, but not widely known.

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Amazon’s new digital music store just launched in the US. Major label music that plays anywhere on any device, for 89-99c per track. 2 of the majors are there at launch, 2 are yet to come, but we found the new Kanye West album and that’s all that matters.

Non-US customers will be pleased to know they can buy and download songs just fine with their Amazon.com account - even if their credit card is from another country. Just enter a non-US shipping address (if you’re not from the US, try ‘AL’ as your state and 36310 as your zip). Amazon will quickly ship a fat box of nothing to the non-existent address, and let you download your mp3s.

Linux users can download individual tracks, and albums are on the way soon. According to Amazon: ‘a Linux version of the Amazon MP3 Downloader is under development, and when released will allow entire album purchases’. We’d prefer to fetch the album zipped via our browser, but the downloader offers a few more options that could be fun.