iSmashPhone

ZiPhone's Blog For Sale: Still Trying to Make Money the Wrong Way?

This is Zibri, the man behind ZiPhone's Blog and the ZiPhone jailbreaking app.  Zibri has decided to step away from both blog and app.  To that end, he's selling the blog:

"Here's how the sale works:
Go to the donation page, donate $50 and write your buy offer in the
donation description free text field.
At the end of the sale the highest bid will get the domain.
Direct emails will not count as bids.
If by the end of the sale the maximum bid will not meet my minumum requirement,
all $50 donations will be refunded and the sale won't happen.
Sale result and winning bidder will appear on this site.
The sale will end on 20th January 2009.
If the winner won't pay the bid by the 10th of February 2009,
the 2nd higher bidder will be the winner."

As of this writing, the bidding purports to be at 28,500 euros.

Zibri leaves the cracking wars with more than a little controversy in his wake.  Ziphone reportedly only worked on version 1.0 of the iPhone, whereas the DevTeam's tools have kept up (better) with the upgrades.  Zibri also claims that discoveries he made himself aided the creations of jailbreaking apps in the first place -- discoveries that were allegedly ripped off from him without credit or recompense.

"Recompense."  Aye, there's the rub.  Ziphone has always been a pay app, which (coupled with the myriad PayPal donation buttons littering his blog) rub a lot of people the wrong way.  By comparison, the DevTeam has always released their work for free.

Buh-bye, Zibri.  Nice knowing ya.  Hope you find a money mark who'll take that blog off your hands...

App Developers Are The New Silicon Valley Millionnaires

Newsweek has just discovered what iSmashPhone readers have known for a while: not only can anyone and his mother write and publish an iPhone app, said anyones and mothers can get rich in the process.

Thousands of people are writing applications for the iPhone and selling them through Apple's App Store, which is part of the iTunes online market. Apple launched the App Store in July and has already delivered more than 300 million downloads of more than 10,000 applications (some choice samples: a free Bloomberg stock-market terminal, and a 99-cent "iBeer" that sloshes around when you tilt the phone). "We've never seen anything like this in our careers," Apple CEO Steve Jobs told Wall Street analysts on an earnings conference call in October.

The article profiles Ge Wang and Jeff Smith of Smule (whose Ocarina app, thanks to its 400,000 downloads since November, has netted its creators a cool million), Brian Greenstone of Pangea (Nanosaur II), and Trism creator Steve Demeter.  Greenstone, in fact, has found iPhone app coding so easy and profitable he's discontinued development of Mac games: "Some kid in his bedroom can literally make a million bucks just by writing a little app."

[Via Newsweek.com]

SnaptureFlash Adds Flash Photography To iPhone -- You Just Can't Own It Yet

Quick, what's the one thing the iPhone camera lacks that just about every other cell phone's camera has?  A built-in flash, that's what.  This means, of course, that low/no-light photography ranges from extremely difficult (requiring clever tricks like Night Camera's image stabilization hack) to damn near impossible.

Enter Snapture Labs, with the logical solution: SnaptureFlash, an external Xenon flash unit that snaps onto your iPhone and is designed to be used with the same company's Snapture picture-taking software.  Here's a before-and-after shot to demonstrate the difference:

Looks nifty, right?  Well, before you throw away that expensive Canon Digital Rebel, a couple of caveats:

1. SnapFlash is not yet officially available.  From Snapture's FAQ: "Snapture Flash is still a prototype, and Snapture Labs is actively seeking manufacturing partners to bring it to market. We are taking pre-orders now, you can sign up today and we will reserve one for you."
2. To compound matters, Snapture itself is not officially sanctioned by the App Store (the company blithely states it's for "jailbroken phones"), so you can bet your fisheye lens that the House of Jobs would take an even (no pun intended!) dimmer view of rogue hardware such as the SnapFlash.
3. Early testers have observed inconsistent exposure levels and/or color balance in SnapFlash photos, with other light sources in the frame being the suspected culprits.  Keep in mind, again, this is a work in progress.