iPhone Software

Polar Bear Farm Software has recently released a somewhat groundbreaking piece of third-party software for the Apple iPhone called PBF ShowTime. ShowTime's claim to fame is that it brings video capture/recording to the iPhone - a feature not natively found on the iPhone (at least not as of firmware 1.1.2). Though other experimental applications that record video on the iPhone have been released, none have been as well-formed or fully featured as ShowTime.

That's not to say that ShowTime doesn't have it's issues. It certainly does. First, a look at what ShowTime can do:

Though seemingly simple, that's nothing to squawk at. This simple feature list is, as mentioned, more than we've seen from other attempts. Take a look at the following video to see ShowTime in action

Newly available via Installer/AppTapp is iSMS, a native text messaging client replacement for the iPhone. iSMS - also called weiSMS, is partially based on WeSMS, a Chinese SMS application, and provides a list of features/enhancemens not found in the standard iPhone SMS application. These lacking features have been high on iPhone owners' lists of gripes with the iPhone.

Though very much a beta, officially only a "preview release", iSMS provides many functions not available when sending text messages on the iPhone through the included interface. The two most prominent of these added features are the ability to send a text message to multiple recipients (or bulk SMS) and the ability to forward received text messages.

The list of major SMS features not normally available on the iPhone which iSMS adds includes the following:

Efiko Software has just announced version 2.0 of their very popular iPhone ringtone creation and installation software, called iPhoneRingToneMaker. Though there are several methods and software packages iPhone owners can use to get free ringtones on their Apple iPhones, iPhoneRingToneMaker (along with iToner) is on a short list of these solutions which will allow users to make a ringtone from existing music on their computers, are easy to use, and are well supported by their creators.

Of course, all of this easy-to-use goodness comes at a price, albeit an extremely modest one. Purchasing ringtones through iTunes costs basically $0.99, should you buy

Navizon, who released a third-party software GPS solution for the iPhone a few months ago, announced today that it is offering a new, free version of it's software. The previous version of the Navizon software offered a 15-day free trial after which the software expired. The new version will switch to a 'Lite' mode after the trial expires and allow users to continue enjoying Navizon's GPS services, albeit in a dumbed-down fashion.

The new Navizon Lite is basically a less accurate version of the fully-functional Navizon software. Instead of providing what Navizon claims to be the 10-30 meter accuracy of the full version of Navizon, Navizon Lite provides approximately 1500 meter accuracy (roughly a mile).

Essentially, Navizon Lite is Navizon without WiFi positioning. This limits Navizon's positioning abilities to cellular tower

The long awaited update to the popular iPhone jailbreaking, application installation, and iPhone customization software, iFuntastic, is now available. This latest version, 4.6.1, offers the most automated jailbreaks (which iFuntastic likes to call "unshackling") for 1.0.2 and 1.1.1 iPhones that we've seen thus far. Still required are plenty of restarts and switching back and forth with iTunes, but the instructions jailbreak process through iFuntastic seems to be the easiest to follow.