When I ordered my iPhone 4 on June 16th for delivery in July, one of the features that I was intrigued about was FaceTime, Apple's Wi-Fi video calling application. Sure, other phones have had this feature for a while, but for me this was going to be something new.

After an abortive attempt at my first FaceTime connection with Kelly Guimont on Wednesday, I finally connected with one of my fellow bloggers (Dave Caolo) yesterday morning. Later in the day, Erica Sadun and I tried out a few tricks with FaceTime. We agreed that some of things we discovered while playing with Apple's newest software toy were postable, so click the Read More link to check them out.

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Given the amount of iPhone and iPad apps coming out these days, I'm not all that interested in getting excited about an app before it comes out. There's already plenty of games and apps available now, so worrying about not-yet-released apps isn't all that important. That said, this app called EpicWin is gaining quite a bit of attention -- it's a very originally designed to-do list masquerading as a game that gives points for accomplishing things in real life.

If this idea sounds familiar, it's because we've seen it before -- Booyah Society was supposed to be a game that rewarded you for real-life accomplishments, and there have been a few other apps like it poking around. Most of them haven't worked very well -- the issue has always been that there's no validation, no proof that you've done what you said you did in real-life. But EpicWin has some solid developers behind it (the folks that worked on Little Big Planet for the PS3, and MiniSquadron for the iPhone), and a very intriguing art style and tone, so maybe it'll be more intriguing than what we've seen along these lines in the past.

EpicWin is "coming soon" to the App Store -- we'll keep an eye out for it, and let you know when it's out.

When I heard about the updated version of Ben & Jerry's iPhone app, "Scoop of Happiness," now with augmented reality, I really wanted to give it a try. After all, I've finally upgraded to a phone that can do all that neat/gimmicky augmented reality stuff, so why not?

The app has a few typical (and not-so-typical) features you'd see in a restaurant or store chain app, such as a store locator. Then it has something new called "Moo Vision," which has that added augmented reality flavor. You point your iPhone's camera at the lid of one of several qualifying pints of B&J's, and, after a few seconds, you're staring at the lid with an odd 3D image atop of it.

I'd love to show an example of this first-hand. The problem is, I don't eat Ben & Jerry's ice cream. So, short of looking like a real loon in the frozen food isle at the local grocery store, it wasn't happening. However, I had a little luck fooling the app by pointing it at an image on my laptop screen of one of the qualifying flavor lids. Give it a try yourself (only Milk & Cookies in the image works).

I'm all for doing neat things with the iPhone camera, compass and gyroscope, but this usage appears to be severely lacking. It's more fun trying to see if you can trick the camera with a web image than it is to actually see it in full action.

The Ben & Jerry's Scoop of Happiness app is currently available and free in the App Store.

[via Mashable]

Is that little 50' motor yacht of yours just not making your heart beat with joy any more? Do you need a new yacht on which to stretch your legs and get away from the paparazzi? Does it just bother you that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has a bigger yacht than you do (see photo above of his "boat" in Copenhagen)?

No need to worry! Just pull out your iPhone or iPad and install the new free Sunseeker Brokerage app -- it's free! -- and you'll have access to details about the entire line of new Sunseeker Motor Yachts, as well as over 200 pre-owned luxury yachts. The new boats section includes vessels from 48 feet in length to 170 feet, along with plenty of interior and exterior images and specifications. You can find your nearest Sunseeker office from the app, then fly your Gulfstream G550 to that location to finalize your customizations and sign the paperwork.

Of course, with the state of the economy being the way it is, you might have to tighten your belt and look at pre-owned vessels like that €18 million Leopard 46 Metre that is languishing at anchor off of Cannes. The Sunseeker Brokerage app lets you email questions about each yacht you're interested in, or email specs to your buddies. You can browse all of the vessels you're interested in while you're offline; the app can save info for any boats that meet your requirements.

Me? I think I'm going to hold out for that ISA 133 series -- it's a steal at only €10,800,000.

The popular Navigon app for the iPhone has had a significant update which is likely to please current owners and may get the company some new sales as well.

New features include Live Weather (which gives the current weather wherever you're going), parking information, iOS 4 integration -- including background navigation and Retina Display enhancements), and updates to the NAVTEQ maps included.

Additionally, there are some nice changes and improvements to the graphics, so this is a fairly substantial update. Read on for a little more insight.

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Update: Manton Reece points out that the issue of in-app purchases being made without challenge is probably due to the App Store's holding onto purchase authentication for a few minutes after buying or updating an app. Craig Hockenberry cites the advantages and potential pitfalls of 'communal computing' on iDevices.

Several iPhone and iPad users have noticed charges totaling several hundred dollars on their iTunes accounts. At first, the issue looked to be part of the App Store's recent woes, but it appears to be linked to an app called Fishies from PlayMesh -- best known for its iFarm app.

Fishies allows you to create a virtual fish tank. You can raise fish, become friends with other users and make purchases for your underwater world. The program itself is cute and colorful, therefore appealing to kids. While the app itself is free, you have to purchase in-game currency called virtual pearls. These run from 99 cents for 10 pearls to $149.99 for 1950. To do this, you need to input your iTunes account information -- though some are reporting that the app isn't prompting for this before the purchase is made.

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As all parents know, a two-year-old is a distinctively different creature than the giggly, adorable infant and winsome, inquisitive toddler that precedes her. She has moods; she begins to articulate wants and needs with a precision bordering on the frightful; she can peel the paint off the walls with a stubborn tantrum or amaze with a clearly expressed insight. For the two-year-old, it's the beginning of understanding that the world doesn't always conform immediately to her desires -- and man, is that ever a giant buzzkil. It's a challenging, sometimes deeply trying transition from babyhood to being a kid. It's the terrible twos.

You could argue that the App Store ages in Internet time (it's like dog years, only slightly faster), so in terms of its mental age it might be closer to a gawky adolescent than a human two-year-old. Nevertheless, as we mark the 2nd anniversary of the launch of the App Store back in July of 2008, in some ways it is remarkably like seeing an individual personality emerge from an immature, unfinished baseline. It may be a personality with a fondness for bathroom humor and some disturbing control-freak tendencies, but it's something.

I could cite superlatives from here until the App Store's next birthday -- over 225,000 apps live in the store, more than 40 thousand unique publishers, over $1 billion in revenue paid out to a crowd of still-enthusiastic developers -- but what it comes down to is this: Apple built a market. Built it, made it run, invited in the innovators and 'the crazy ones' who decided to see what would come of their hard work. Before the App Store, most people didn't associate 'phones' and 'applications' at all, even though there were plenty of apps out there. Now, a would-be smartphone that skips over the app availability question is pretty much dead on arrival.

Happy birthday, App Store; we'll begin our celebration today from the date of the press release announcing 500 launch applications (500!), even though tomorrow (July 11) was the on-sale date of the iPhone 3G with OS 2.0. Congratulations to all the people both inside and outside of Apple who have contributed to making the past two years as lively and exciting as they've been. We can't wait to see what happens next -- even if it is a few months of tantrums and growing pains.

[hat tip to William @ Different District]

Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt | flickr: cc

We've heard great things already about the brand new Apple Store in Shanghai, but this one's interesting: on the back of employees' t-shirts there (which are red, apparently, rather than the usual black found in North America), Apple has printed "Designed in California, Made for China" in Chinese. That's obviously a play on the "Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China" that you'll find on the back of your iPhone and many of Apple's other products.

Cult of Mac checked in with Chinese gadget blogger Chris Chang, and he says that the reference does play in Shanghai. He was at the store when it opened, and says that Apple is definitely pushing to do better in China, and create more of a presence there. That's really interesting -- Apple's not only trying to simply sell its products over there, but it's actually localizing the brand a bit to do so.

I've been watching the e-reader competition with great interest lately -- after the iPad entered the market with such a splash, Amazon and Barnes & Noble have been trying to position their own devices in a place where they'll at least be profitable. But at the same time, those apparent iPad competitors have also been updating their own App Store apps. Amazon updated the Kindle app a little while back, and now Barnes and Noble has updated its own iPad app, including support for multiple orientations and brightness control, along with a few other bugfixes and features.

As I said before, I like the precedent here -- even if these companies don't match up with Apple on the hardware, this update does a lot to bring the B&N eReader in line with iBooks. Of course this gives us iPad users more options -- even if we don't own a Kindle or a Nook, we've still got the chance to use those services.

I would like to see a little more progress made with compatibility -- it's annoying to buy a book on one platform and not be able to read it on any other. But I guess that's the trade-off for having options -- Amazon and B&N will only keep up their app development while the money is coming in from their respective bookstores.

I bought a one terabyte Time Capsule shortly after it hit the market, along with an external 1.5TB drive. I use the Time Capsule's internal drive to back up two smaller capacity Macs, while the external disk backs up my two larger capacity Macs.

Working with Time Machine in Leopard or Snow Leopard, the Time Capsule updates its backups every hour. This makes perfect sense if you're just dealing with one Mac wired into the Time Capsule, since it really doesn't slow anything down. But if you are using it to wirelessly back up multiple Macs, hourly backups slow everything down to a crawl.

TimeMachineEditor (a free utility that I highly recommend), allows you to set Time Machine to back up as frequently or infrequently as you like. I created a setup where, with staggered backups starting between 2am and 4am, each Mac gets backed up once a day. Outside of some errant sparse image problems that required a reformat, all was well. I had long beaten the 18 month Time Capsule funerals that were recently reported... but then things turned ugly.

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