Drumming to Mario

This is pretty damn sweet:

Thanks Peter!

Let your iPhone play Name that Tune

This is REALLY cool.

Take your iPhone and hold it up to a speaker/radio/etc playing nearly any song and run Erica Sudun’s insane new app, Listen. It will ‘sample’ whatever is near the iPhone’s microphone and after a couple of seconds will display the song, artist and album of whatever it heard. I’ve had about 75% success with it so far.

This isn’t necessarily new technology as I recall hearing about services that could do this before, but this is a new free app for your iPhone (sorry Touch users – no microphone on you!).

It’s not on installer yet so you’ll have to ftp it to your iPhone for now
It’s available on Installer – thx Conner!

found via TUAW.com

iPod touch vs iPhone

Wow…what a bombshell this morning!

The new ‘iDevices’ are pretty impressive….and the implications are pretty far reaching.

The biggest thing for me was the price cut of the iPhone from $599 to $399 (USD) for the 8gb iPhone. This has to be one of the fastest price cuts in Apple history for a new product that’s only been on the market for just over 2 months. Does that mean it’s overpriced and nobody was buying them except early adopters like me? Or are they realizing cost savings due to the volume of sales and production? As usual, John Gruber has some interesting thoughts on the reasoning behind the price drop.

I ‘accepted’ the price point of $599 for the iPhone when I bought mine back in July and I still do but Apple is certainly going to hear from a huge bunch of whiners. It’ll be interesting to see how Apple responds to the outcry and inevitable class action lawsuits from people wanting their $200 back.

If I recall when Apple released it’s high end photo management program, Aperture, it was sold for $499 and then later reduced to $299 with a refund or credit going to all the original purchasers. Of course, it probably wasn’t sold in the same volume as the iPhone has either so I’m doubtful that will happen without litigation but would gladly take an iTunes/Apple store credit to soothe the early adopter pain.

The iPod touch just seems to be missing something – the homescreen just looks too barren especially when compared to the iPhone. You’d think they’d make the buttons bigger or change the layout somewhat unless they have big plans instore for it (and the iPhone). I can see games being sold very soon on the iTunes store that work on either device (probably coming from companies like EA).

Once the iPod Touch hits the stores, it won’t take long (like minutes) before the hacking scene goes to town on it like they have with the iPhone.

UPDATE: Looks like Apple will give a store $100 credit to the early adopters next week! The bad press was certainly taking it’s toll and this is a fair resolution to quiet the complainers:

Therefore, we have decided to offer every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store. Details are still being worked out and will be posted on Apple’s website next week. Stay tuned.

Email your iPhone’s music & Easily add Ringtones

Erica over at TUAW.com has done it again with the “Song Sender” app which allows you to navigate your iTunes music library on your iPhone and either set a song to be a ringtone or you can even send a song to a friend via email!

You have to install the app via the secure FTP method I previously described. Once installed and ran, Song Sender presents you with a scrolling list of all the music on your iPhone. If you click on a song, the menu options (shown at left) are given. You can start or playing a song, Send to Email (which I found took awhile on wifi) or Send to Ringtones which pretty much replaces my need to ever have to run iFuntastic again (at least for ringtones). That is pretty cool!

It literally seems to get better on an hourly basis in the third party app world for the the iPhone. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Apple does to either stop or encourage this kind of development on a supposedly closed system considering hackers and programmers have been adding the functionality that everyone has been saying is lacking. So far, Apple’s only response has been patches with primarily bug fixes which are always welcome, but not much else.

Take off your clothes

While I was in California, my friend Paul gave me a preview of some videos he was making. I thought they were pretty fun so check out my favorite, called “Take off your clothes” performed by Breakfast (not Paul):

Direct link

Check out a few other songs Breakfast performed as well…he plays a mean ukulele.