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There have been a lot of console adaptations brought to the iPhone, but sending games the other way hasn’t been as common. Firemint is changing that, however — they’ve announced that they’ll be bringing iPhone superhit Flight Control to the PlayStation 3 as a downloadable title, and the game will even support the new Move controller, so you’ll be able to draw flight paths in the air with a motion control wand (or you can use a regular dual stick controller if you’d rather do that). The game will also bring 1080p support, as well as a four-player drop-in/out mode and an exclusive map named “Metropolis.” Flight Control HD will be available on the PSN on September 15th.

I’d be interested to see some other iPhone-specific titles make the jump to major consoles as well — with the onset of Kinect and Move, translating the iPhone’s touch controls to the television should get a little easier. We’ll likely see a few more big iPhone titles (Angry Birds? Doodle Jump?) head across from Apple’s platforms to more traditional gaming outlets in the future.

TUAWFlight Control coming to PS3 on September 15 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I don’t know how much of a newsflash it really is that Apple is working on brand new versions of the iPhone and iPad, but just in case you thought that the current iterations were the last, let’s set the record straight. Code in the latest iOS release shows that Apple is currently working on “unreleased hardware.” The code, which bypasses the required iTunes activation, assuming that you have the right hardware, tends to show up before an iPhone revision — in other words, while the new hardware is out, about, running the iOS system, and in testing. The code then disappears as the hardware goes off to launch.

The code does mention “iPhone 3,2,” “iPhone 3,3,” and “iProd 2,1,” but those names don’t tell us anything about the actual hardware, just that they’d be new versions, obviously. And we’ve seen these names before hidden in iOS documentation, so these aren’t new developments — whatever these versions are, Apple has been working on them for a while. Still, if you haven’t been following along over the last few iterations of the iPhone, yes, we can tell you that we’ll see new iOS devices at some point in the future. Maybe someone will even leave one sitting around a bar.

TUAWCode shows future iOS devices currently in testing originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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VMware has pushed out an update for their virtual machine software for Intel-based Macs.

Version 3.1.1 includes:

• Improvements to iSight Camera access
• Fixes an issue where an incorrect disk error message pops up after A Mac hard crash while working in VMware
• Fixes audio recording issues when the device output was not 44.1 kHz

The update is free for all VMware Fusion 3 users, and the update notice should appear when you launch the app. This is the 4th update to version 3 since it was launched in October of last year.

VMWare Fusion 3.1 is available for US$79.99 as a download, and you can add a subscription to all updates for 1 year for an additional twenty dollars.

TUAWVMware Fusion gets an update with some important Mac fixes originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Is Apple the most reviled brand online? Answer: not by a long shot. Some of you may recall a few studies this year and last year, or a few quarterly earnings calls to suggest that no, Apple is far from being the “most reviled brand” that Mr. Gralla claims in his linkbaiting headline over at Computerworld.

Brandwatch, another one of those awesome social media analyst firms, claims to have tracked over 1,200 messages on Twitter in a month directed at Apple. Which, to me, sounds astoundingly small given Apple’s dominance in the tech news world. But Brandwatch has to get clients, so why not spout some nonsense about how Apple is “reviled” given a bunch of cranky tweets, right? I mean, it’s not like Twitter is full of vacuous, id-fueled reactionary comments, right? Nah, clearly tweets and blog posts complaining about stuff is enough to let the Cupertino goldmine know that its days are numbered.

Yes, as Apple grows and expands it will carry along with it an ever-increasing number of people unhappy with their experience. We’ve all had some goofy thing happen to our Mac, iPhone, iPod or iPad. We’ve all been somewhat irked when a pleasant experience was “ruined” by this issue. But just because we feel the need to tweet our displeasure — as opposed to constantly tweeting our positive experiences — it doesn’t mean Apple has a PR disaster on its hands.

That said, the tech consumer is a fickle sort. Gralla likes to bait the “fanbois” with his language, but the fact is that Apple hasn’t courted the cult for a while. In case you’ve been asleep for a decade, the “Think Different” campaign died long ago and Apple’s latest mantra has been to gain marketshare. You don’t do that by focusing solely on your rabid fans. You do that by going into new markets, broadening your appeal and making insanely great products. According to Apple revenues, this seems to be working quite well. No doubt the geniuses at Brandwatch know better.

TUAWHyperbole police: Apple is the most reviled brand? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With the addition of the Safari Extensions Gallery to Apple’s website, TUAW will be highlighting extensions that we think are special, useful, or just plain fun.

Fellow keyboard jockeys will appreciate this one. Safari Access Keys displays a site’s keyboard shortcuts in the browser’s toolbar. Many sites like Wikipedia employ keyboard shortcuts, which make navigation faster and easier. However, they aren’t always readily apparent or even consistent. Safari Access Keys solves the problem by displaying each key combo clearly.

As a bonus, the extension’s author explains how to enable the HTML accesskey attribute on your own site. Well done, Dale!

TUAWSafari extension highlight: Safari Access Keys originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You’d think that an iOS game that was originally priced at $0.99 and is now selling for $1.99 wouldn’t have a piracy problem.

You’d be wrong.

French game developer Godzilab recently tweeted that they’ve seen a 37.5% piracy rate for their massively mulitplayer online basketball game, StarDunk. The tweet also included a plea for help — “37.5% of StarDunk players are using a cracked version. If anybody has a good way of detecting them, we’ll take it.”

Mobile gaming site PocketGamer noted that in a followup, Godzilab said that the figure was calculated from the total number of copies of StarDunk that were sold in the App Store and the number of unique accounts that have been registered with the online (Plus+) server. The latter number was much larger than the former, leading to the online disclosure of the StarDunk piracy problem.

Whether the solution comes from Plus+, the developer, or a combination of the two, it’s certain that someone is going to find a way to stop the piracy. Perhaps releasing the game in a free, ad-supported version for the people who can’t afford to spend two bucks might sink the pirate ship.

Note: As the developers have noted in the comments, “We are actually counting the number of unique accounts, so if you install the game on iPad/iPod/iPhone multiple time and still use the same account we will count this as one game bought.
So yes, we might count a few users who have multiple account but that should only be a few.”

TUAWArrrrr. The pirates have plundered StarDunk originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The iPhone 3G sold tremendously well in South Korea, and now distributor KT Corporation is hoping the latest model will do the same when pre-orders begin on Wednesday. “We hope the iPhone 4 will draw a hot response from clients as the iPhone 3 did,” a KT Corp. rep said on Monday, noting that the iPhone 4 should be available in South Korea in September.

When iPhone 3G pre-sales began in South Korea, KT Corp. received approximately 65,000 pre-orders. On the day of release, customers had been lined up as early as 26 hours in advance and were rewarded with balloons and a live band.

Apple has sold more than 850,000 iPhones in South Korea since the 3GS went on sale in November of ’09. Above is a television ad that ran prior to the iPhone 3G’s release.

[Via MacDailyNews]

TUAWiPhone 4 pre-orders about to begin in South Korea originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We don’t have the whole story yet, but apparently on Saturday there was an attempted robbery at the Salt Lake City retail store — the front window was smashed and the perpetrator tried to get away with several iPads, but as you can see in the gallery below it appears that he was taken into custody by police.

As soon as we have the full rundown, we’ll fill in the details. Thanks to reader S. Mason for letting us reproduce his photos.

Not a particularly good weekend for the retail stores’ security; a Macrumors forum member reported that the Knox St. Dallas store lost 8 iPhones in seconds to thieves. 9to5 Mac links the story, but unfortunately those pictures are Photobucket-hosted and not available at the moment.

Update: Our photographer relays this narrative…

I am surmising that three young Apple fans were so excited to pick up their iPads that they inadvertently forgot to pay for the merchandise. In their haste to get home and try out these fantastic machines they somehow shattered the multi-hundred pound, 12′ door to Utah’s flagship and only official Apple store.

The Apple store manager was not happy at all that I even took any pictures and with the backing of the mall-cop present threatened to have me and my family escorted off the property, despite the 50+ people inside the store documenting the event on their iPhones and the other 100+ plus people watching in the mall plaza. The amazing thing was the Apple store folks carried on almost business as usual — theft? what theft, broken glass? what glass, but no pictures please!

TUAWAttempted iPad theft at Salt Lake City Apple Store originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gravity Runner is a little game put together by a group called We Are Colin — it’s a side-scrolling platformer with, as the name implies, a gravity defying twist. The idea is that after tapping to jump as your little character runs along, you can tap again to switch his gravity, and start running on the ceiling rather than the floor. As you might expect, the game gets tough fast — not only is the speed uncontrollable (the game is somewhat forgiving, as hitting obstacles will usually get your guy to stop rather than actually kill him), but the jumping is kind of “floaty,” requiring split-second timing even early on in the game’s 25 plus stages.

There’s also an endless mode to play with, and OpenFeint functionality adds leaderboards and achievements to the mix as well. Gravity Runner isn’t really playing around — just a few stages in, you’ll have to depend on both quick timing and a little bit of thought about which way your guy is headed. But it’s an excellent platformer that eventually turns into a puzzle game, as you try to see just how to get your character jumping up where he needs to be. At its current price of just 99 cents, Gravity Runner has a nice retro charm that’s worth the buck.

TUAWTUAW’s Daily App: Gravity Runner originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 16 Aug 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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