This Week's Sponsor:

Textastic

The Powerful Code Editor for iPad and iPhone — Now Free to Try


Valve to Furnish Mac Gaming Community with GL Code

As Mac gaming took a turn for the better with the introduction of Steam and their fantastic offering of games such as Half Life 2, Counter Strike: Source, and Team Fortress, Valve’s feeling the love for our underrated gaming machines. As PC gamers sporting only the coolest of liquid-fueled rigs shake their heads in disbelief, Valve developers are having some heart for us aluminum junkies by sharing their developments with the rest of the gaming community. Joystiq writes,

Business development director Jason Holtman told GamesIndustry.biz that Valve will release some code to developers signed on with the company’s Steamworks infrastructure, in order to expedite the development of Mac games (and thus speed up the population of Steam). “So our Steamworks partners will have access to some of the hard work that we do to get our games up on Mac,” Holtman said, “and they’ll be able to incorporate that into their games – and our hope is it gets them there faster.”

Though now that we have Starcraft II, I can’t see anyone wishing for anything more mind numbing than blowing up Zerg scourge anytime soon.

[Joystiq via TUAW]



FaceTime Over 3G Is Now Possible

For jailbreakers, at least. My3G, the tweak that makes iOS believe it’s on Wifi when it’s actually using 3G, has been updated to version 4.1 to include support for FaceTime. Simple as that, you just have to check an option.

My3G is available on Rock ($3.99) or through ModMyi’s repo in Cydia at $2.79. I haven’t tested the app yet, but I’ll keep you posted about my results. It’ll also be interesting to hear from American users whether AT&T’s network will be able to undergo the traffic of jailbreakers or not. Please let us know in the comments below.

This is huge, anyway.

UPDATE: ModMyi’s repo seems to be down at the moment. It should be back online in a hour or so.

UPDATE #2: Check out the video of FaceTime with My3G below, courtesy of 9to5mac.

Read more



Safari Extensions Monday: Sessions, KeySearch, Instapaper in Google Reader

I spent a week using the latest Firefox 4 Beta and now I’m back to Safari. I can’t help it, but Safari has the best support for 1Password out there and that, combined with amazing tools such as ClickToFlash, is too valuable to me. If you add stability, speed and elegance to the mix - I guess you know what I mean.

So, Apple launched the official Safari Extensions Gallery last week, and there are more than 100 “officially approved” extensions in there. It’s a good place to discover new stuff, but I’m wondering how often Apple will update it. Anyway, I’ve just installed three new extensions to start the week, and they’re pretty great.

Read more



Manufacturing Change to White iPhone 4

It’s easy to wonder what the hell is going on with the iPhone 4. You’d think there wouldn’t be much of a difference between the black and white models asides from color, but WhiteiPhone4Now reports that the OEM producing the front frame recently changed their manufacturing process; the frame previously wouldn’t sit flush with the steel band, though that issue is now resolved. Click past the break for a shot of the original damage done.

[via WhiteiPhone4Now]

Read more


iOS 4’s Nasty Calendar Bug

I’m looking out for our calendar users this morning suffering from iOS 4 woes. For those dealing with scrambled or blank events in the list view, iTWire quickly details how the problem may be remedied:

Some solutions are showing up. Our calendar is hosted by Google and uses CalDAV to sync to the iPhone. By going into the account settings and deselecting the “Birthdays” calendars the List View is correctly refreshed. So, it would seem that one of the default calendars created by the operating system is to blame.

Neowin suggests that entries older than six months old are also to blame, so you should archive older entries if you can. Though if you’re connected to an Exchange server, there’s not much you can do to fix the issue other than submit your standard Apple feedback report.

[iTwire via Neowin]


The iPhone 4 Around the Globe [Spoiler: Don’t Buy One in Italy]

So you want to purchase an unlocked iPhone 4 in some foreign country. Sounds good, I did the same with mine - and I bought it from an Italian seller who bought it in France and sold it for 200 Euros more. Not a great story, but I needed it. Anyway, iFun put together an interesting chart showing the prices of the iPhone 4 around the world.

It turns out, Italian iPhones are the most expensive. Hong Kong ones are the cheapest. Check out the image below (click for full size). But don’t buy one in Italy.

Read more