Toxoplasmosis at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 12/28/10 by divvied

Put my iPhone on the table at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, fired up the SoundCloud app and recorded this Toxoplasmosis performance.

To describe the duo badly: experimental noise.

Doc Pop wears many digital hats: iPad musician,  visual experimenter of mobile apps, blogger, yo-yo madman, game developer/designer, painter, illustrator, etc. etc.

He’s was also my first follower on the (primarily) iPhone (only) social photo app http://instagr.am.

The good doctor does a Daily App Experiment where he takes an images and applies manipulations using different iPhone apps.  He used a photo I shot and posted to Instagr.am yesterday to make #48 in the series.

Daily App Experiment #48: “Nettled Birds” – Saw this pic in @dippold’s instagram and asked if I could play with it. Using TypeDrawing, I added one trillion birds to his original image. I’m really happy folks are willing to let me alter their images. (Taken with Instagram at Daily App Experiment) ~Doc Pop

Make the jump to see my original image and read more about Doc Pop and Instagr.am

My original Instagr.am image, the starting point in his Daily App Experiment #48.

If you don’t have an iPhone, or aren’t ready to download the free app yet, Doc Pop feeds his Instagr.am photos and images into a Tumblr for general viewing.

Another noteworthy and recent project of his is the electronic-pop-ish record “Beats and Smudges,” recorded exclusively with mobile applications.

The Glif is a small thingy that fits snugly onto the corner of your iPhone 4.  It enables you to then mount your iPhone 4 on most tripods.

It also:

• Props up your phone so you can watch video
• Can turn the iPhone into a mini computer (with the use of a bluetooth keyboard)
• A handsfree method for FaceTime calls It even acts as a shield for the phone’s antenna issue.

But the thing has yet to even be manufactured.  Regardless, this future product fills such a need and want that at last check those behind The Glif are up to $95,120 — vastly exceeding their goal of $10K — with 21 days remaining on their Kickstarter project.

I recently called B & H photo, the massive Audio/Visual outlet based in NYC, to find out if their website was erring.  How is there are millions of iPhones — with an OK camera and now capable of HD video — and no way to mount them on tripods?  I believe B & H told me they don’t carry anything like this because there is nothing like this currently on the market worthy of their store.

Maybe the The Glif could rectify.

Looks like a $20 contribution to The Glif KickStarter project will snag you a pre-order of long awaited iPhone accessory.

Related articles

• A Simple Tripod Kicks Up iPhone Photography a Notch (mashable.com)
• Glif iPhone 4 tripod adapter & stand has huge public appeal (slashgear.com)
• The Glif: We Need This iPhone Stand & Tripod Mount (macstories.net)
• iPhone Mounting Stands – The Glif iPhone 4 Tripod Stand is a Convenient Accessory (VIDEO) (trendhunter.com)

The checkered background that shows up on the iPhone when information either hasn’t completed loading or the processor hasn’t caught up to your scrolling, is usually a palette of gray. Pictured above is more a set of reds. Is this new, a fluke or an error?

Google Latitude, a web and mobile phone service that shows where your friends are on a map, has gone live.  However, it seems to have a few kinks left in it as the above iPhone screen grab shows.  Right now it doesn’t seem to work at all on my iPhone.  And, even after I installed Google Gears on my iMac, Google Latitude would not detect my location automatically despite the numerous wi-fi networks around to grab my location.  I had to set it manually.

Read more about how the service should work on the Official Google Blog.

Not to totally knock satellite radio, but from what I’ve experienced so far, it is just not worth it.

I recently signed up for a free XM trial online.  Limited to roughly 80 channels, the trial lasts only a few days and takes place entirely online where it seems all the bugs lie unsquashed.  Navigating from channel to channel is simple enough, just scroll and click the desired station.  But the biggest drawback lies in the total lack of traditional control buttons.  Kiss the forward-a-channel and back-a-channel buttons good bye.  Volume controls?  What are those?  To top it off, you hear lo-fi streaming by default and must seek out the hi-fi option.

After deciding upon a channel and clicking, it took at least nine seconds to hear anything.  Luckily, it only takes two or three seconds to show what is playing (either a song title or who’s talking), but still an eternity when finding something worthwhile.

Enter the commercials.  Since satellite radio charges a subscription fee, why are there any ads?  Although commercial free stations abound I guess this is like cable TV where ads are simply accepted.

There are a few other minor gripes.  I experienced buffering.  Although other internet content loaded perfectly, XM occasionally stalled.

XM programing is mediocre.  Besides the few interesting speciality programs, there is no killer content to seal the deal.  I like the Outlaw Country channel and XMU, the indie station, but they’re nothing a few hundred online terestrial and internet stations couldn’t replace.

Unless you live in the country where internet service is poor, drive extremly long distances, or must listen to your sporting events, an iPod hook up and a fully loaded iPod would probably serve you better.  Too many free options exsist to piss money away on piss poor programming.  Thousands upon thousands of free stations and podcasts are availible free online.  Amazing apps like Pandora and Fstream exsist for your computer and for the iPhone.  So give them a shot if you haven’t already.

In the coming days I’ll post on some of my favorite podcasts and online radio stations.  So stay tuned (to the internet.)

Wanted to point out this little error by Apple. Not really even worth mentioning. Nevertheless, the iPhone iTunes store says it can not be accessed without a Wi-Fi connection.  This is not true.  It only takes, at minimum, a Edge connection to get in where podcasts under 10 MB can be downloaded.  Any podcast over 10 MB requires a Wi-Fi connection.

I’m not sure, but believe regular tracks from the iTunes store require Wi-Fi.  At least that’s how it use to be.  Things may have changed with the new 2.2 update.  Not sure.  (The above screen capture is probably just the same one left over from version 2.1 where every connection to the iTunes store on iPhone required Wi-Fi.)

A text message appeared on my iPhone yesterday and shortly thereafter came an email stating that AT&T is finally offering up free Wi-Fi to iPhone customers “at thousands of hotspots”.  Here are the instructions to connect if you happen across one:

Activate Wi-Fi from the settings icon on your iPhone.

Select “attwifi” from the list of available networks.

Enter your 10-digit mobile number and check the box to agree to the Acceptable Use Policy. Tap “continue.”

You will receive a text message from AT&T with a secure link to the AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot. You will not be charged for the text message.

Open the text message and tap on the link for 24-hour access to the AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot.

I know, I know, I bitch and bitch about my iPhone here all the time, but I really do love it.  For the most part.  Until shit like the above screen grab happens.

I’m pretty sure, when I sync my iPhone to iTunes, all my apps are properly updated and transferred between computer and device and vice versa, but I get the “unknown error” pictured above every time.  I check the version number of the apps on the phone and computer and both say I have the latest version. Still this error message pops up on every sync.

Simplify Media is an awesome application.  It allows you to listen to music from your iTunes library remotely.  If installed on your home computer, you can basically leave that computer running and then access all the music on it from your work computer, your iPhone, wherever Simplify Media is installed.

But when I went to install version 1.1.1 for the iphone an epic fail occurred.  Not only does the icon appear with a non-functioning status bar (as pictured above), the app store still shows I have one update to install, and the phone throws the following message:

“You’ve already purchased this item but it hasn’t been downloaded.  If you’re having trouble downloading it, open iTunes on your computer, select Check for Purchases, then sync your device to your computer.”

What the hell am I doing wrong here people?

Hopefully, the iPhone 2.1 software will do away with both of these issues.

Click Screengrab to Enlarge

This is a screen grab of my iPhone application updates in iTunes.  One simple question: Why are applications showing up two, three times?  Seems like this shouldn’t happen.  And I have no guess as to why except maybe something is screwing up if I choose to update them on the iPhone and then again in iTunes?